Winter's Guardian
by TheVertigoMaster
Summary: Elsa Arendelle is the enigmatic CEO of Frost Industries. Kristoff Bjorgman is an ex-soldier turned bodyguard who has seen more than any man should. A storm is brewing, felt only in the creeping chill that frosts up on the edges of the consciousness. It is the foreboding sense that everything is about to change for the worse. Business AU with a twist. Kristelsa.
1. Elsa Arendelle

**A/N: **Hello, this isn't the first fic I've written, but its the first one I've decided to post on here. I warn you now that you're going to be in for a long one, so hopefully you think that's a good thing. If not, oh well. Enjoy. :)

**Chapter I: Elsa Arendelle**

I hadn't known rich people could be so eccentric. I suppose that when your title alone provides enough wealth and power to easily finance an affluent life of luxury, you end up with an absurd amount of free time, and have to spend it doing equally absurd things. You'd think there'd be a limit to it at some point, though.

The doors that led to the conference room opened as several sharply dressed people swarmed out into the hallway, heading their separate ways, some chatting, others silent, and others distressed, striking out toward the restrooms situated next door. Icy blue heels clicked on tile as she approached, pace quick, head down, platinum blonde bangs bouncing, tendrils of hair dangling from a tight bun, the fingers of one hand rapidly spamming messages on a glowing BlackBerry, a snowflake on a keychain dangling from it. The other hand held a cup of coffee: a mocha latte, two cream and three sugars. I would know, she had me buy it that morning, like every morning—she was dressed in white slacks and a white suit jacket over a pale blue formal blouse along with a pair of white gloves. She was also wearing sunglasses, a pair of silver aviators, indoors.

I nodded as she neared me, turning around in her direction as she passed me and following on her right, with my colleague, Sven, the rookie, on her left.

"How was the meeting, ma'am?" I asked lightly, and without expression.

She stopped dead and turned to face me, though I could not tell through the reflective abyss whether she was actually looking at me. Her brows furrowed.

"You can talk?" she remarked. It sounded like an inquisitive groan of surprise, she was clearly tired and irritated. Her voice often sounded quite nice—almost musical—on a good day, as rare as they were. Her dark lenses stared impassively at nothing, at everything.

"Quite well," I replied coolly.

She grunted thoughtfully, before turning on a raised crystalline hell and continuing down the clinical and minimalist hall, taking a swig of her liquid confection. Sven looked over at me apprehensively, and I looked back at him with my most intimidating and intense stare. He folded like a leaf under it, and looked away. I too turned back around, smirking underneath my intangible bodyguard mask, as we approached and entered the elevator, and ascended the spire of a tower that was the Frost Industries headquarters.

My charge was none other than Elsa Arendelle, the enigmatic CEO of said company. Her nerves have been frazzled ever since I've met her, and likely for a lot longer than that, though I've only been guarding her for the past few months. Ominously, this made me one of the most senior member of her staff. Though, when you take into account her volatile shifts between a harried, impatient woman and a social ice queen, as well as her strangely sparse eating habits, and the rumors of many strange accidents involving her, it becomes a bit more clear why I would be considered as such, though it was still not very encouraging.

Our transport awaited us on the roof, a sleek, short-winged urban jet resembling an SUV without wheels. Not a word was spoken as we approached and boarded the vehicle with Sven driving, me in the passenger seat, and our charge in the very back. She was still tapping away at her phone, still wearing shades; it was even darker in here than it was in the building. The entire routine was the same every time, with the shades being an exception, as she wore them all day on seemingly random days. I never asked; it was not my place to, and even if it was, she likely still wouldn't have told me anyway. It was just her way.

Nothing eventful or worth mentioning happened for another hour and 45 minutes—the amount of time elapsing the expanse of mundane activity that covered the flight to the estate, the landing on its roof, and our entry into the building.

The doors leaving the helipad opened to reveal a flash of bright orange hair, accented by a curious streak of white and plaited as twin braids, that went on to light up the rest of the world with color in my eyes. Anna Arendelle, sister to Elsa Arendelle, was one of the few things worth mentioning in my repetitive, predictable, and uneventful life, and the only one worth a lot more than just mentioning.

"Elsa!" she cried, racing down the hall toward us. She was clad in casual attire, a black long-sleeved blouse with some sort of design printed upon it, and jeans. She was barefoot. Elsa put out a hand, still holding her phone, though it was not an invitation to an embrace, but a hand denying passage. Anna's face fell at the sight and she stopped running. She hung her head as Elsa walked past her without a glance, Sven and I trailing a ways behind. It was the same every time, and while I pitied the auburn-haired woman, I didn't say anything; it wasn't my place to, and even if it was, I still wouldn't have asked. It just wasn't my way. There wasn't anything I could have done anyway.

She turned as I passed her, and smiled half-heartedly, the somewhat expected rejection still weighing heavily on a heart large enough to care, and strong enough to try to endure the lack of reciprocation.

"Hello, Kristoff." Her eyes were as sincere as they always were; she was a terrible liar and knew it, so she had given up on the idea altogether. I nodded curtly back at her.

"Miss Anna," I clipped. It was formal and stiff, but it was as warm as I could make it from underneath the mask. It was at least warmer than her sister's greeting, or the lack thereof. I think that's why she smiled at me as I continued on down the hallway, going about the rest of my uneventful routine as senior bodyguard to the cold-hearted and eccentric CEO of one of the most powerful corporations in the world. At least the pay was good.

— —

It had been almost a week, and it was golf day, the third Sunday of every month. I don't even know why she played, she was honestly terrible at it, but we all clapped anyway whenever she eventually sank the ball into each hole; to challenge her eccentric side would be to challenge her frigid and cold-hearted side as well, and no one had ever escaped that without some kind of frostbite. Out of all of her strange hobbies—none of which she really seemed to actually enjoy—golf was the most puzzling. Elsa never liked to make mistakes; she didn't tolerate it in herself nor in others. I had been lucky enough to master the art of details very quickly in her service, but her own skill at it always seemed to escape her on the course. Underneath her sometimes odd appearance, she actually concealed a large amount of grace and coordination, but it always seemed to evaporate whenever she was near a golf club.

A new hole. Elsa squared off at the tee, and after a moment, swung, hearing the whoosh of the driver and nothing more. She sighed in irritation and repositioned, hands clenching and unclenching, clad in white gloves. Another pause, another swing, another empty swish of air, another groan. Sven and I stood in the shade, clad in our immaculate black suits with our earpieces and concealed handguns, standing besides a few of the other staff members, keeping watch from a small distance, close but not too close, just how she liked it.

Elsa resumed her stance, her shoulders set, feet planted apart, determination rolling off of her in waves. A long pause ensued in which no one moved. It wasn't really any different from the others, but it still felt different, almost cold, though there was no wind. The others shifted slightly, and it seemed that I wasn't the only one who had noticed the change.

Her arms raised the club behind her, over her head, pausing again, before coming down and swinging once more. A satisfying crack filled the air as the white ball sailed through the air and down the field. Everyone clapped. The air began to warm, and I felt slightly uncomfortable in my dark suit. Sven was acting as caddy, as usual, and took the golf club that she handed to him without turning her head, though whether her eyes glanced over at him was impossible to determine, as she was wearing shades again.

I took my place beside her. "An excellent hit, ma'am," I complimented dryly. I didn't really care, she didn't really care, and we both knew it.

"Don't patronize me." She knew it wasn't impressive, I knew it wasn't impressive, and we both didn't really care.

An hour later, we were returning to the manor on foot, as the entire 18 hole golf course was situated on the grounds along with a sizeable pond, a helipad, and a stable full of horses that no one ever rode. There was much more than that, but none of it was hardly worth mentioning. Elsa's scores from her solitary game on the green were horrendous, though relatively better than they had been in the past. She wasn't happy about it, though it wasn't really that surprising. It must be stressful to continuously strive for perfection.

Anna awaited us at the door. She didn't watch Elsa play. She had at first, when her elder sister had first decided to take up the sport, but Elsa had told her to leave. To the best of my knowledge, it was the last time she had ever spoken to Anna. That was over two months ago. The redhead watched us passively as we passed into the mansion, and not a word was spoken. She smiled at me before giving a light greeting and walked away down another hall. I realized then that she had only ever said it to me, not Sven.

Elsa had returned to her study, a large high-ceilinged room, usually silent except for the ticking of a massive and ancient grandfather clock. She sat down at the desk, placed her elbows upon it and began to massage her temples; she'd been doing that a lot lately.

"Coffee," she barked, the command sending Sven scurrying out of the room. We were alone now. The silence never really bothered me; before I had accepted the offer for the position as Elsa's bodyguard, I was living a quiet post-military life in a cabin far to the north, with no company other than the wind, the snow, and the occasional reindeer. Now though, in that room, I felt myself become oddly restless. Perhaps it was the clock—its ticking was deafening against the quiet of the room—or perhaps it was because Ms. Arendelle had for some reason not dismissed me from the office.

Her hands dropped from the side of her head, and lay clasped together before her. Her pale head looked up at me, platinum blonde bangs framing her face, the rest plaited in a long, thick, solitary braid tossed over her shoulder.

"Why are you still here?" she asked, perturbed.

"Would you prefer for me to wait outside?"

"I..." she trailed off and sighed as she sank into the leather seat, taking off the aviators and tossing them lightly onto the desk before rubbing her eyes with slender, manicured hands. There were very dark bags under the irises, and the eyes themselves were almost bloodshot. "No, it's fine, I guess. It's just different, that's all. It's weird."

"Ma'am, are you alright?" I felt quite concerned, my job entailed not only protecting her from physical harm, but guaranteeing her health and safety in general.

"Do I seem unwell to you?"

"In all honesty, yes. Have you not been sleeping well?" She frowned at me in confusion and raised a hand to her temple, where her shades would have been if she were wearing them. The hand clenched tightly.

"No. I haven't." Anxious hands stroked at her braid as she looked out the window. The afternoon light touched her face, highlighting her freckles, and causing the dark marks to appear even more severe. I almost winced.

"When was the last time you tried to sleep? If I may,"

"Thursday night."

It's Sunday afternoon.

I wasn't sure what to say. I was partly rendered speechless by the revelation, and was then unsure whether I should admonish her for it; If I made one wrong move, the situation could end rather badly. She turned around and looked me in the eyes, intense crystalline blue, the hue that emerges from thick ice. I hadn't seen those eyes in over a week. She chuckled cynically. "It's funny, you're the only one I can trust now..."

I wasn't quite sure what that was supposed to mean. "What about Anna?" I asked.

She shook her head sadly, and seemed to curl in on herself. She sighed, "as you are a senior member of my staff, and charged with maintaining my health and safety, there is a matter that you should be aware of-"

The door opened, and both of our heads snapped up to it, Elsa quickly grabbing her shades. Sven stood on the threshold, a cup of steaming coffee in his hand. He looked between Elsa and I, trying to figure out why she suddenly looked so pissed off.

"You're supposed to _knock_." She snapped. An expectant hand stretched out, and a chastised and thoroughly embarrassed Sven handed over the drink. She took it and drank from it heavily, grimacing suddenly, before placing the cup down and settling a glare back at Sven.

"Unbelievable."

Sven seemed confused, getting an almost deer in the headlights look. His eyes flicked at me for a moment before he spoke, his voice wavering, "ma'am?"

"Mocha latte, _two_ cream, _three _sugar." She dangled the cup, "this only has _one_ cream and _one_ sugar in it."

Poor Sven's eyes dramatically widened practically to the size of dinner plates, and he cringed. Elsa was very particular about details, almost to the point of obsession. She slammed the cup back onto the desk, a few droplets leaping from the small opening at the top, and leaned back heavily in the chair, crossing her legs and folding her arms, "Please, tell me, _Sven_, why the _hell_ should I put up with you?"

"I..." his hands were beginning to shake.

Elsa stood suddenly from the chair, her arm knocking into the drink, causing it to tumble and spill, splashing scalding, too-bitter coffee on the floor, desk chair, and Elsa's white pants. She yelled in frustration, her hands fisting into her hair, her arms and hands trembling.

"Ma'am!" Sven and I cried in unison, only managing to take a single step forward before she put out a hand to stop us.

"Kristoff, coffee. Now."

I pursed my lips, hoping I wouldn't regret what I was about to say, "Perhaps you should just rest, ma'am."

Sven whipped around to face me in alarm, as if I had decided to make my last stand and play the valiant, tragic hero. Elsa seemed furious at the challenge. We stared each other down in silence.

"Coffee."

"Sleep."

"_Coffee._"

Sven's terrified head looked back and forth between us, as if the confrontation was a tennis rally with the ball on fire.

"You have a meeting tomorrow morning, and with all due respect, I am tasked with ensuring your health and safety, and I feel it is prudent that you get some rest immediately."

She bit her lip, hands clenched at her sides, her head down. The coffee was staining her pant leg. "Fine." She turned and left the room.

I released the breath of tension I had been unconsciously holding and began to follow her. Halfway to the door, I realized Sven hadn't moved. I frowned at him, "What are you standing there for?"

He was trembling violently, and peered up at me, "Am I fired?"

I smirked, "No, not yet, now come on. If you manage not to fuck up again today, she may forget about it by tomorrow."

He nodded, "I hope so..." He looked over at the light brown mess on the floor. "I'm going to notify one of the housekeepers."

I grunted in response and left the room to find my charge; we may have been within the safety of the manor, but I still felt the need to not stray too far. I hoped that she would be able to sleep well.

— —

There were no sunglasses today, and her eyes were clear and focused. That was a good sign. The trip to the board room was as uneventful as always, though she had been sparing me quick and furtive glances ever since we left the manor. The sudden acknowledgement and attention was a bit unsettling, but it was perhaps somewhat justified, considering the very memorable events from yesterday.

_You're the only one I can trust now..._

Was I really? Surely there were others, the other senior staff members, a friend perhaps, or...Anna? Why didn't she trust Anna? Why _couldn't _she trust Anna? Her own sister, her benevolent flesh and blood, who had never shown her anything but sincere and heartfelt kindness, even when Elsa had continually spurned her again and again. Was it something hidden in their past? A falling out of some kind? While my charge had her moments of callousness, she had at least shown some sort of acknowledgement to those in the path of her storm, but with Anna, it was as if she wasn't even worth the time, invisible. Perhaps it had to do with what she was going to tell me before Sven had interrupted us.

As we neared the plainly elegant wooden doors that led to our destination, Elsa's face settled into her own impassive and stern mask, wearing a righteous, self-important attitude befitting a wielder of immense power, an arrogance not marred by cockiness or concealed ineptitude.

As it was just a board conference, and not an exclusive meeting, Sven and I were allowed to be inside the room while business was conducted. It was about as boring as I had expected it to be; the department heads gave their reports of the past month's developments, addressed their mundane concerns, which were answered, and they then discussed what was to be done next. I always blocked it out, as it wasn't my area of expertise, and I didn't understand half of it anyway. Since Elsa never seemed perturbed by it, or in any way distressed, it probably wasn't much of a threat to her anyway.

From what snippets did manage to catch my uninterested ears, there was an upcoming merger of some sort with South Isles Corp, but my charge of course never spoke to me about it, and, as I said, it wasn't any of my concern.

Sven, however, seemed much more interested in the discussion than I was. His eyes followed the sounds of pompous voices when they should have been monitoring and scanning the rest of the room. I glared at the side of his head with disapproval, but he didn't seem to notice.

The day was adhering exactly to the usual routine until after the meeting adjourned. We followed Ms. Arendelle out of the conference room, but instead of making her usual beeline for the elevator, she headed down a separate hallway to her right. A ways down it, I realized that she was heading to her corporate office, a room that she rarely, if ever, used. She swiped her hand over its surface, and the latch unlocked with a click as it read her chip.

She pushed open the door and leveled a stare at Sven, "stand guard outside."

"Yes ma'am."

He positioned himself by the door as I followed my charge into the window-lit room, the door closing behind me. I stood at the entrance, hands clasped before me, feet apart, on guard and out of her way. She walked to the edge of the stately desk in the room's center, before turning on a raised heel and sitting against the edge of it. She faced me with folded arms and intense blue eyes, locked onto my own like poised throwing knives. I swallowed internally.

"We did not finish our discussion from yesterday."

"Was there more you wished to tell me, Ms. Elsa?"

She fidgeted, her strong gaze suddenly broken along with her mask, as she looked down at her feet and bit her lip in an extremely rare gesture of hesitance, of fear.

"There is nothing that I _wish _to tell you, only something that I _must _tell you."

I waited in silence for her to continue, but she did not elaborate. "Ma'am?"

Her brows furrowed, she still hadn't looked up either, "I have...a condition," she began, placing her weight back on her feet and beginning to pace the room. "Though I suppose it would be more apt to call it a curse, from the nature of it..."

She stopped pacing, exhaled wearily, and murmured, "the rumors about the accidents...they're all true, " her eyes flicked up at mine, "but they aren't."

"How do you mean?" I asked, puzzled.

"They did not happen in the way they say, it was all covered up." Her gaze had darkened, and her hands were clenched at her sides, "there were no 'engine failures', no 'faulty wiring', no 'cracked support beams', no 'gas leaks', it was none of that..." Her voice trailed off weakly as her arms gripped each other over her stomach, hugging herself as if she feared she would crack and shatter into pieces. She looked so defeated and vulnerable that I feared she would never speak again.

"What was it, Ms. Elsa?" I coaxed in the most gentle tone I had ever used on the job—the most gentle tone I've ever used with anyone at all. I resisted the urge to take a step forward, fearing that she would just back away from me. She did anyway, as if my prodding had represented the same thing. I noticed she was trembling.

She squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head, "No...no, I-I shouldn't...I can't tell you," she shrank away further, backed up against the desk again.

I felt myself become overcome with a sudden rise of anger. I stepped forward, "As you, yourself, stated, my place as your bodyguard requires me to ensure both your safety and your health, and that this matter is something I would need to know of to properly do that." I sighed, and continued more calmly, "What really happened, Ms. Elsa?"

She shook her head again, "This was a mistake," she began to pace again, clutching herself even harder, "I should never have said anything...I shouldn't-" she took a deep breath and pressed her hands to her temples and began muttering something to herself continuously, like a mantra.

"With all due respect, Ms. Elsa, I believe it is urgent that you tell me about this."

She was still muttering.

"Ms. Elsa!"

She stiffened and exhaled. Her back straightened, and her hands unclenched and lowered to her sides calmly. She turned slowly, and looked me in the eyes. Hers were cold, like the merciless frigidity of a northern winter storm. Her mask had returned. "We will speak of this no more."

I clenched my teeth, and reluctantly held back my fury as I stared her down, "Yes ma'am."

She held my gaze for another moment before flicking away dismissively and heading for the door, which I opened for her, and then followed her through.

It wasn't until I had re-entered the comparably warmer hall that I realized how deathly cold the office was.


	2. Beware the Frozen Heart

**A/N: **I will be attempting to keep up with a weekly update schedule for the future.

**Edit:** Corrected a few grammar mistakes.

— —

**Chapter II: Beware The Frozen Heart**

There was an incident today. It's only been three days since Elsa refused to tell me about her condition, and the subject hasn't been mentioned since. In fact, she's been actively taking steps to ignore and avoid me. There have been no more passing glances, she hasn't spoken to me at all, and almost all of my tasks that required any interaction with her have been delegated to Sven. The fact that she was willing to put up with that young man's incompetence really showed how determined she was to stay away from me. Naturally, I was worried.

Her efforts were the reason why I was standing guard down the hall from her study while she was inside with him. The distance was much too great for my tastes, though she had never cared before how close or far we were if she couldn't see us. As it was, I was too far away to protect her if anything were to happen. Then again, the chances of someone getting into the manor and past the rest of the estate's vigilant security were impossibly slim.

The explosion rattled the walls violently, and knocked over both vases and uncoordinated staff members alike. I ran full tilt towards the ominous cloud of dust that had appeared, one hand clenched around my gun, and the other clutching a handkerchief to my mouth for the impending smoke. Oddly, I didn't encounter anything.

As I neared the study, the only things that seemed out-of-place in the hall were the thin clouds of dust and the massive, shining pillar of blue and white crystal protruding through the wall like a massive frozen dagger, fringes of destroyed drywall and insulation littering the floor. The spike itself was a solid, translucent rod nearly half a meter across that was pointed wickedly sharp at the end. A cold mist began to seep out from beneath the door to the study, mixing with and then overtaking the dust that had once permeated the air.

"Ms. Elsa!" I yelled as I barged in, gun aimed before me until I nearly slipped on the floor. The entire room was frozen over, as if a bomb of liquid nitrogen had gone off within the space. Sheets of crackling ice, pulsing with energy like the rhythm of a heartbeat, covered everything, the floors, the walls, the ceiling, the furniture, even Sven, who stared in shock at the desk, or rather, where the desk had been. The edifice of furniture was now on the ceiling, suspended by two of the countless ice spikes that were all over the room. Some were hanging as stalactites, and others protruded from the floor like rogue, serpentine beasts, arching and twisting and burrowing into the walls.

Elsa stood out in the open in a position that would have been behind the desk if it were still on the ground. She was frozen, not of ice, but out of shock. She turned sharply at my boisterous call as it echoed through the frigid space. The ice distorted sharply behind her like small ripples in a pond.

I could hardly believe it. I was staring directly at it all, but it hardly even registered in my mind. I kept telling myself that it was unreal, that it had to be some sort of vivid dream, some kind of illusion. These things just couldn't happen. Magic wasn't _real_; it was the sad truth of the world.

But then what was it? I asked myself. What could be the cause of this if not magic? Unless it was some sort of insanely powerful cryokinesis, but was that possible either? Perhaps it was some kind of freak air conditioning accident? No, absurd. There was no way it could be that, even if that was what the authorities would likely say. This was something more, and there was no denying it, no matter how badly I wanted to.

"Bjorgman..." Her voice was quiet, hardly above a whisper, but I heard it clearly; it seemed to resonate with the ice around her. The pulsations quickened.

"What...happened, Ms. Arendelle?" I found my own voice to be just as hushed, still struggling to process what my eyes were showing me, what the goosebumps on my skin were telling me. My charge said nothing; she likely didn't hear me, as the ice did not seem to carry my voice like it did for hers. If she did hear me, perhaps she was simply too stunned to say anything more. I went over to Sven, feet unsteady on the ice.

"Sven, what happened?"

He said nothing. He didn't even move, or look at me.

"Sven, hey!" I grabbed his shoulder and tried to shake him, jumping away sharply at how cold and stiff he was; it was like touching a statue. He still hadn't moved, or reacted in any way. Cautiously I touched his throat, feeling for a pulse, but found only bitterly cold stillness. There was nothing to indicate that Sven was still alive. With a sinking feeling, I saw the full extent of the icy frost that coated him. Here he stood before me, in a room full of ice, unmoving and completely unaware of his surroundings, because he was frozen solid.

Sven was dead.

— —

The meager light of twilight shone softly on the white walls of Arendelle Manor's exterior, though it was almost entirely blocked out by the bright alternating shine of police lights. The large circular driveway was filled with emergency vehicles and personnel. The same light shone in through the glass window of the study, which was now mostly thawed, but still damp with liquid. The large spires had been chiseled apart and discreetly carted away by the senior staff, leaving only the damage the ice had caused to the room itself. Sven still stood in the center; the housekeepers were too afraid to move him for fear that he would shatter, as the ice that was encasing him was also securing him to the ground.

Elsa sat on the remains of her desk, which was back on the floor again with gaping holes marking where it had been impaled. Her feet rested on the edge of the wooden surface with her knees tucked under her chin, and her arms wrapped around her shins. I stood by the door, inside the room, keeping watch, as I always tried to do, and as I had failed to do earlier.

My eyes passed over Sven again. If I had been faster, I might've been able to save him, or so I had thought foolishly, stupidly. It was likely the explosion of ice itself, which had spurred me to action in the first place, that had killed him. He was dead before I even had a chance. As much as it was technically my charge's fault, I couldn't bring myself to blame her; had she of kept me at my usual post, I would likely be dead as well. It was no wonder why she had been pushing me away all this time.

With the revelation, everything seemed so much clearer now, and yet the only new thing I could see was more fog lying before and obscuring a few simple truths. How long had she had this "condition"? Did anyone else know? How many others had fallen victim to her? Was this the real reason why no one ever lasted very long here?

The more questions that came to my mind, the more Elsa seemed to draw into herself. I suddenly felt a strong yet unfamiliar desire to comfort her, but I knew that trying to do so would only make things worse. She wanted to be left alone. I was only here because it was my duty to protect her from the world outside, and evidently from herself as well.

The official record, the story that was told to the authorities, and the account that the outside world would use for their gossip, was that it was a ruptured gas line that caused the explosion. I'm not sure how many people actually believed it, but all of those who would speak out were paid off with a decent amount of hush money, so it didn't really matter. Besides, no one had even been allowed near the study, and as such, no one knew about Sven.

The head steward of the estate, a senior staff member by the name of Kai Lancemen, was currently outside speaking with the chief of police about the incident. From the sound of their voices, which were still clear from within the manor, it was becoming a bit of a heated argument, or on one side, at least. Kai had in the past proven to be both extremely loyal and extremely level-headed, so the yelling was likely coming entirely from the chief. The frustrated slam of a hand on metal confirmed it, and the volume of the incoherent shouting increased. I hoped Kai would be able to handle the damage control on his own.

I noticed Elsa curl in on herself further and shiver.

"Are you alright ma'am?" I asked.

She said nothing, of course. I partly wondered why I had even bothered to say anything; she hadn't replied or said anything back to me since I had first entered the room hours ago, which was long before the explosion had led to concerned neighbors calling the police, and the arrival of the red and blue armada that was now assembled in front of the mansion.

I abruptly realized with sudden clarity that I was missing something embarrassingly obvious. Though the ice was gone, the room was still chilled enough for breath to appear in puffs of condensed vapor, and Elsa was only wearing a thin white blouse—which was now dirty—along with a short pencil skirt, but no shoes; her calves and feet were only covered by dark, thin pantyhose.

I shrugged off my jacket and approached her, holding the garment before me, but she stuck out a hand to stop me, not even turning her head to look.

"Ms. Elsa, if I may-"

"There's no need. I'm fine." Her words were followed by yet another small cloud.

I frowned deeply, her stubbornness over the past few days had exhausted the entirety my patience. To _hell _with polite subtlety. "It's cold enough to see your breath, and you are not adequately dressed. You'll catch a cold. Put on the jacket." In other circumstances, I would have winced inwardly at the sharpness of my words. Such direct speech was akin to asking for a death sentence from her.

She smiled bitterly, as if at some dark and private joke. "If its such a big deal, wouldn't you need to keep yours on then?"

"Your safety comes before mine, ma'am. My own well-being is insignificant," I replied honestly and plainly.

Shocked frozen irises snapped up and glared up at me indignantly, "how can you say that?"

I frowned, shrinking back slightly under the weight of her gaze. I was puzzled by the outburst; she was usually able to keep her emotions in check, even better than I could. "Because it is true," I stated obviously, "I am your bodyguard, your guardian. I am meant to protect you. You come first."

She shook her head sadly and looked away.

Still somewhat emboldened by her sudden bout of talkativeness, I pressed on, "I assume this..._power_ of yours was the condition you were referring to before?"

She said nothing. I took it as a lack of denial.

I sighed, "If I had known, this may have gone-"

"You are in no position to chastise me," she snapped, interrupting me.

Miffed, I started again, "If I had _known_-"

"What difference would that have made?!" She was yelling now, her arms spread angrily. I noticed that she had gotten to her feet. She was beginning to choke up, "If I had told you, you...you would've insisted on being in here, and then... you'd be dead too." Her hands fell with her gaze, and balled into fists at her sides.

Hearing concern from Elsa was rare, especially when directed at her staff. It was...unsettling, almost much as the unwelcome swelling of pride that I felt in my chest.

I leered at her sternly, masking my reaction to her words, "Did you do this on purpose?"

Her arms snaked up and gripped each other over her stomach, "Of course not..."

"Then you can't blame yourself for it." I exhaled, "I admit that I don't know how any of this works, but perhaps there's a way to control this... ability of yours."

"You mean my curse..."

"I don't believe in curses."

"Even though you've just witnessed one?"

"If it is a curse as you insist, then who cursed you? And when?"

She looked away, "I don't know, and I've had this for as long as I can remember. Why does that matter anyway? It could be a curse on the family line for all you know."

"Does Anna have it too, then?"

The temperature plummeted even further as Elsa's expression darkened. I could faintly hear the crackling of frost around me.

"No. She doesn't."

"Are you sure?"

"More than anything."

I sighed, "Well it doesn't change things. I'm going to help you learn to control this power of yours. Also," I draped the jacket over her shoulders, and she did not resist this time. She instead fingered at the edge of the sleeves. She didn't seem to react to the warmth at all, though I could definitely feel its absence.

She stared at the floor, "there is no need..."

"I assure you that there is."

She smiled as she shook her head again, "the cold never bothered me."

I looked over at Sven grimly, and saw his glassy, dead eyes staring blankly at the wall, frozen in time, "I suppose that's to be expected."

— —

I lay on my bed, staring at the ceiling, still clad in my dust-laden clothes from the day—shoes and all—with my eyes in the distance and my head in the clouds. My charge had retired for the night not long after the police had left the premises, and so I elected to do the same. Sven still stood in the cold study; I wondered idly if he would ever melt.

The air conditioning system quieted, and the room was plunged into a silence so profound that it brought the same uncomfortably lost feeling to the ears that pitch darkness brings to the eyes. Perturbed, I rose from the bed and left the room with a walk in mind; my brain was hardly letting me sleep anyway after the day's events.

I stood in the dark, moonlit corridor, my wayward feet now unsure of where to take me. I looked down the hall at the door to Elsa's room, and after silently deliberating for a moment, turned away and headed in the opposite direction.

The end of the hallway opened up into the large entry chamber that housed the main staircase along with several other hallways branching off in different directions. I was on the second floor, and approached the nearest railing, resting folded arms on it as I looked out at the room below and before me. The light from outside shone in here as well, and reflected off of the black and white checkered marble that made up the floor, illuminating the large space.

Elsa had ice powers, ice powers that she was unable to fully control. I sighed wearily at the thought. While knowing was certainly better than not, especially for something like this, it was still troubling. It made my job a _lot _more difficult, and had caused me to question almost everything I had believed in. If such a thing as her powers was possible, what else was? Were there others out there like her? Would they be looking for her? Regardless of the answers, it was obviously imperative that no one should find out about her ability, which made it even more important that she learned to control it.

I was suddenly ripped away from my thoughts by the sound of an impact of some kind from downstairs. Instincts and training taking over, I steeled myself as I slowly crept toward the stairs, my gun drawn, the safety removed. Upon reaching the bottom of the stairs, I glanced around at the different dark hallways, unsure which one the sound had come from, as it had echoed throughout and from seemingly all directions. With nothing to go on, I hazarded a guess and started with the one on my right.

The sound of my footsteps transitioned from muffled to silent as the cold and colorless marble gave way to a dark maroon carpet. When the light from the entryway failed to assist me, I affixed a small flashlight from my pocket to the underside of my gun's barrel, and continued on into the dim—but slightly more visible—corridor. I still hadn't heard anything since the initial noise, and was beginning to worry that I might have chosen the wrong hallway, when I saw something orange catch the light. It stiffened and turned around sharply, exposing pale freckled skin and wide, guilty eyes of oceanic teal.

"Ms. Anna," I nearly gasped, dropping my gun-wielding arms quickly, and removing the flashlight from the firearm to be able to hold the beam before me. I frowned at the young woman. "What are you doing up at this hour?" I questioned stiffly.

"Oh! Uh, hi! Um..I was just uhm..." She trailed off, eyes looking over at nothing, mouth slightly agape, before snapping back as if nothing had happened, "did something happen today?"

"I suppose," I replied carefully with a frown. While it would have made sense for Anna to know about Elsa's condition, their short and cold interactions in the past made me doubt that was actually the case. "You didn't hear about it?"

She shrugged, and looked down at her hands, which were knitted before her. She was dressed in a pale green nightgown, and her hair was disheveled, as well as loosed from its twin braids, allowing the flowing amber locks to cascade down in spirals as they attempted to retain the shape of the plaits, clinging strongly to their past. "No one ever really tells me anything around here," she smiled nervously, her eyes shifting about awkwardly. She perked up, causing her bangs to bounce lightly, "Have you seen Sven lately?"

I tensed involuntarily. I hoped she didn't notice.

She did. Concern laced her expression, "Is something wrong? Is he alright?"

My mouth was open, but I was unable to speak. I cursed the cracks in my mask. "Perhaps this isn't the best time, Ms. Anna."

She laughed dismissively, "Just Anna is fine, seriously, you're practically family."

My brow furrowed in confusion at that.

Sensing that she said something odd, she put out her hands in a placating gesture, "Oh! No, I don't—well, I mean I do but, um..." she sighed and began to wring her hands, "Nevermind that, though I'd still like it better if you'd call me Anna. Just Anna." She smiled with a slight tilt of her head. It was the most endearing thing I had ever seen, and I resolved then and there to never let it fade if I could help it. If Elsa did not wish for me to tell the grim truth of things to her sister, then I wouldn't say a word about it. Reason be damned.

There was still another matter that had to be addressed, however. "Very well, Anna, but what are you doing up this late? Could it not wait until morning?"

"Well, there's people out and about in the mornings, and during the rest of the day..." She trailed off again, eyes fixed back to her hands. It seemed that awkwardness was simply a general trait of hers.

"And that matters why, exactly?"

A blush began to creep into her fair, freckled complexion, "They wouldn't have let me see it..."

"See what?"

She tucked a lock of hair behind her ear, and my eyes involuntarily followed the entire motion. I drew them away forcefully, and focused them back on her own eyes, unwilling to acknowledge the forbidden feeling that was building within me.

Anna shrugged, "The housekeepers were clustered around this one area earlier, and I also thought I heard sirens and was worried that maybe someone got hurt or something but when I tried to ask them or get near where they were they'd just shoo me off and be all-" her face flushed an even deeper red and she cleared her throat, "Sorry, I tend to ramble a bit, well, a lot actually but it's just kind of like a- Oh! There I go again!" She laughed nervously.

"You should go back to bed," I suggested, "it's not safe to wander around the halls at night, especially in the dark."

"But that's what makes it so much more fun!" she was smiling excitedly, but clammed up again upon seeing the almost horrified look that was apparently on my face, and she retreated once again, "though I guess you wouldn't really agree, being a bodyguard and everything. 'Safety first" and all that..." she laughed again, and the silence drew on as her remark fell flat, just as awkward as most of our exchange. "I think I'm just going to go..." she began walking backwards, but bumped into a stand, knocking it over with a thud that echoed down the halls. She winced, "not again...oh!" She picked it up before I had a chance to assist, looked back at me, and waved a small wave, moving just her hand, "bye!"

I only just managed to prevent myself from returning the gesture. "Do you need me to walk you back?"

"No, no I'll be fine, I-I can find my way there quite easily," her broad smile became wistful, "I've lived here my whole life, after all." A dark and unpleasant cloud began to brew over her head, causing a frown to spread across her face, and into my heart. My mask broke in that moment, or more accurately, shattered, but she had already turned away, and did not see. She ascended the stairs into the dark and I stood alone in the hallway, feeling even more awake and restless than I had before.

— —

The week had passed, and it was now Monday morning again. Elsa was still as cold and collected as always, and Anna was still her bubbly and optimistic self. It was as if the memorable events of last Thursday hadn't even happened, though we all knew otherwise. Elsa simply hid it with her own mask, and Anna with her blissful ignorance of the actual tragedy.

I kept an even more attentive eye on my charge, for I now knew of the destructive power that lay within her, and how urgent it was for her to control it. I began to notice little mannerisms and gestures of hers that I hadn't before, some merely natural nervous ticks, such as hugging her arms to her chest, and tucking her hair behind her ear, and others were a bit less natural, like frost spreading across clenched hands under the table, and drops in temperature falling in time with her surges of fear, stress, and anger. She was trying to hold it all in, and the power was leaking through any small hole it could find. At some point it would all simply burst out of her, the change like a trickling stream compared to a nuclear explosion, but not of blistering fire, or poisonous radiation, but of frigid ice, and if just a drop of that fearsome cold could ice a room and freeze a man solid, one shudders to think what ungodly chaos and havoc could be unleashed by a complete meltdown.

We were alone for the moment in her office at the Frost Industries headquarters, which she had elected to utilize until the losses and damages from the study at the manor were dealt with and compensated for. I noted absently that she still hadn't considered getting a replacement for Sven. In the past, the new rookie would be on the job the day after the previous one's dismissal, or even later that day. Of course, none of those bodyguards had died in front of her, or been frozen solid.

Elsa sat poised at her desk, seated regally in the high-backed leather office chair, one hand grasping a tablet that she was reading off of, the other with the elbow resting on the desk, and the wrist swirling about daintily, absentmindedly. She appeared extremely focused, and looked vaguely pissed off, announcing the return of her eccentric and slightly whimsical side. I stood by the door, in my usual position, doing what I usually did...as usual.

Something white and pale blue began to swirl about her fingers, sparkling like dust, growing layer upon layer until they began to take the shape of small snowflakes-

"Ms. Elsa, your hand!"

She looked up and saw the swirling mass, her previously complacent expression twisting violently into panic as she backed out from the desk and jumped to her feet, sending the cold sphere across the desk, and the tablet against the polished wood floor where it clattered loudly with a heavy and brutal crash. It was now likely cracked, if not broken. She waved her hand about as if to swat a hornet, trying to shake the trailing sleet from it, and accidentally sent a lump of snow hurtling at the wall, the force of the impact shaking the surface and decimating the ice into chunks and powder.

She was breathing hard, almost hyperventilating. The room began to cool rapidly.

I approached slowly, "Ms. Elsa,"

She pressed her hands to her temples and began to pace quickly, her heels clacking on the floor, her lips moving, quickly repeating something over and over, a vaguely familiar mantra.

"Conceal, don't feel. Conceal, don't feel. Conceal, don't feel. Conceal, don't feel..."

She stopped and squeezed her eyes shut, her hands balled into fists, her teeth clenching. Frost began to crackle across the floor.

She was holding it in, and the cracks were widening; the reactor was reaching critical mass.

"No!" I had yelled before I could even warn myself against it.

She started at the sound, and jets of sleet shot out in random directions as she stared up at me with wide, fearful eyes. One of the beams hit me with the force of a bullet, knocking me off of my feet and sending me tumbling.

"You need to let it go," I said, trying to stand back up, determination pulling me up, and then forward, as I approached her. I don't know where my words had come from, but they felt right.

"_What?_" She almost screeched, confusion and terror swirling about her in an icy swarm. She did not seem to share my sentiment.

"If you keep holding it in, you'll burst! You have to let it out!"

She shook her head violently. The blizzard picked up speed, the frozen particles whistling past my ears, screaming like banshees. She stared at the floor, clutching her hands to her chest, "but that's..."

"Direct it at something!" I had reached the desk, and picked up the cracked remains of the ruined tablet. I held it out before me, and the next thing I knew, I was airborne again. I couldn't feel my hands. The walls shook when my back collided with it, and I fell forward onto my hands and knees, my ears ringing.

When I recovered, the swirling storm was gone, and I exhaled a cloud of vapor. I stood unsteadily, and saw a blonde woman before me, dressed in a white suit jacket and pants, with trembling hands and bulging cerulean irises.A slab of ice lay on the floor between us. With a jolt, I realized it was actually the tablet, or rather that it _had been _the tablet. It wasn't frozen over. It was just ice, complete solid ice. I tore my eyes away from it and looked back to my charge, "are you alright ma'am?"

She said nothing, but locked eyes with me, and despite her obvious state of distress, nothing frozen was emanating from her in any way. I took that as a good sign, and with a barely concealed sigh of relief, stood and limped over to the wall to turn up the thermostat.


	3. Control

**Chapter III: Control**

Small, light amber dust motes flew out and embraced the frigid air as leather-gloved hands snapped the worn, black moleskine shut with a clap. A groan let out from the red-headed woman as she tossed the worn book at her bedroll.

"There's nothing good in here!" She whined petulantly, crossing her arms. A cold draft blew in through the rocky opening of the flame-lit cavern, and she shifted the two heavily clothed limbs to instead clutch at her midsection and shiver as her cheeks flushed with the brisk cold.

A young man with wild hair and a long nose sat by their meager fire, feeling at it with his naked hands, "How do you know? You just started reading it."

"It's just his stupid old journal! I've been having to sift through all the boring crap in it to try and find something that's actually relevant, but I'm still still not getting _any _closer to finding anything about _it_!"

A third voice sighed heavily, and the other two turned to look at its owner, who was a massive and sturdily built man sitting cross-legged across from the wild-haired boy, elbows on his knees, and his hands clasped under his chin. The redhead whirled on him, "oh what, and I suppose _you _have some brilliant idea?"

He shrugged and nodded toward the book, "just keep reading until you either finish it or find what you're looking for. It's the only thing we _can _do."

She groaned and started pacing, shaking her head, "But it's so _boring_, I swear to god, if I try reading another damned page of that thing, I'm going to...to do... _something..._" She trailed off and slumped down onto the cold tile floor, arms once again folded, angrily this time.

The boy smirked and raised an eyebrow at her, "_something_, eh?" A hard shove knocked him over and he chuckled good-naturedly, "alright, well if you're tired of it, maybe me and Marshmallow over here can look at it!"

The large man rolled his eyes in exasperation at the nickname; by this point he knew the little man was obviously calling him by it in order to spite him for some reason. "Olaf, that's not my name."

The boy was still smiling, "Sure it isn't, Marshall-mallow!"

The worn, leather-bound diary collided with the side of his head, and a hand instinctively rose to clutch at the assaulted spot. He snapped around to look at where the offending projectile had come from. "Ow, hey!"

The redhead stalked over to her bedroll, "If you're going to read it, you might as well do it now. The faster you do that, the faster we can get out of this freezing hole." She flopped down unceremoniously onto the sleeping bag, and covered herself with one of the large furs that were lying on the floor. "I'm going to bed."

The two men looked over at her for a moment, and then at each other, before the smaller one shrugged and picked up the book, lightly rubbing his temple where a sizable bruise was slowly forming. He spread open the old journal, and began to flick through the yellowed pages. His eyes widened fractionally and he dashed back to a page he had just passed, "Oh, now this looks promising."

Marshall scooted forward a bit and looked over at Olaf with rapt attention. The boy cleared his throat and began, "The method that I had helped Ms. Elsa establish on Monday was apparently working out quite well for her..."

— —

In addition to my mundane duties, the past week has been spent at the manor in a rarely visited and even more rarely used parlor on the third floor, where she had insisted that I help her practice and master different ways to direct, control, and safely discharge her pent up power. She was still adamant about believing it to be a curse, but at least she was willing to try and do something about it.

She stood in the room's center, staring intently at the ornately carved end table that had been sacrificed for today's session. I paced about behind her, watching her perceptively.

"While focus is important, you must not allow yourself to become too tense. You need to work with it, not against it, or you'll just end up hurting yourself."

"That was oddly insightful, considering that you have no idea what you're talking about."

I gave an odd half-shrug and conceded, "True, I don't really know anything about...telekinetic powers, but I do have knowledge of several forms of martial arts, half of which you have likely never heard of."

"I dont see what that has to do with anything."

"To know how to subdue and defeat another person, you must know how they work, both physically and mentally. The same goes for yourself." I looked over at her form again; her posture was still rigid, her shoulders especially. "You need to relax," I stated.

She huffed arrogantly, "fine." Her back loosened a little—barely—but it was progress at least. I sighed inwardly. As she was a major cog in the expansive clockwork mechanism that was the business world, it wasn't surprising that relaxation didn't come to her very easily. I didn't push her anymore, remembering her self-deprecating opinions of failure and success.

While it wasn't much—and it never was—the training was working a lot better than I expected. Since we had begun, she had managed to recreate what had happened at the corporate office on Monday, and we were able to confirm that she had, somehow, converted the cracked tablet into solid ice, preserving every ridge, crack, dent, and changing its composition at its most basic level. Upon seeing her replicate the incident with an old binder, all I did was nod. There wasn't a sliver of surprise or fear present, nor even a single thought of denial. I felt that I had lately been in a permanent state of shock of some kind, standing unfazed as every single day has slammed me with more and more examples and evidence of the impossible, and broken down the walls in my mind upon which I had scrawled my understanding of the universe and the world around me. I would just stand there and nod, accepting it at face value, because I was unable to do anything else. It scared me beyond anything, and yet I was unable to show any of it, unable to truly manifest that fear.

Was this simply what it felt like to discover what lies beyond the veil? To learn that the unreal was in fact very, very real? Or was there just something wrong with me?

I began to wonder how far this new epiphany extended, how much else of the unknown fell under it. I began to wonder what myths and legends were in fact long-lost truths, which monsters of our dreams and nightmares truly lurked in the shadows. I even dared to wonder if there was such a thing as magic; there was no proper or physical explanation that I could come up with to explain how Elsa was able to summon ice out of thin air, cool rooms, and alchemically modify matter. Not even something as already far-fetched as cryokinesis could fully account for all that. These thoughts still plague me even as I write this memoir.

There was an unexpected knock at the door that drew me away from my deep and wayward thoughts, and that snapped Elsa's strained concentration like a twig under a boot, the particles and shards of ice blasting out from her like the metaphorical splinters of wood, embedding themselves in the walls and floor with violent force. One narrowly missed me, and embedded itself in the crown moulding bordering one of the windows, burrowing hardly half an inch from the now literally frosted glass. After drawing my eyes away from the shard, I looked over to see a wide-eyed Elsa with an odd expression of fear in her eyes. It was not one of urgency, but one that seemed almost playful, like a naughty child afraid of being discovered doing something that was harmless yet inappropriate, being terrified yet unafraid at the same time. That rare expression was fleeting, however, and quickly shifted into the one I was more familiar with, so quickly that I was unsure if the previous one had actually even happened.

Even though she wasn't barred from any part of the estate, no one should have known that we were in this room. I had made sure of that, and so had Elsa; no one else could be allowed to know of her powers, and there was no point in informing those who already knew about them that we were in this room in case they could not actually be trusted after all. Despite our thorough and secretive efforts to stay hidden, which had worked flawlessly all this week, someone had found us. When I saw a grimace begin to overtake Elsa's features alongside her mask, I suspected that she already knew who awaited us.

With a glance, she silently commanded me to step away from her, and approached the door. She opened it slightly and peeked through the gap.

"What?" She snapped bitterly in the tone she often used for most of her staff. The only exceptions to this harshness that I knew of were Kai, out of mutual respect, Gerda, whom I was told had been Elsa's and Anna's main caretaker for their entire lives, and me, perhaps out of the trust between us that must be present for me to be able to do my job as well as possible.

The unseen stranger cleared his throat. "Forgive me, Ms. Arendelle, I did not mean to interrupt. I have the data that you requested." I saw a black gloved hand present a folder to my charge. It was a man, definitely, and with a voice still as smooth as cream, and as seductively sly as a viper despite the hesitance in his tone. I hated him immediately.

Elsa didn't take the folder, and instead glared at him. "I _also _requested that you give them to me at check in." Whoever he was, he was obviously new. A silent pause ensued. "Why are you still here?" She grumbled irritably.

"I had noticed that you and your other bodyguard have come this way every day for the past week. I was merely wondering if there was something that I should know."

"That is none of your concern. It's also not your place to ask. Now leave." She immediately slammed the door in his face and walked back into the room, leering at the iced walls and fuming, arms folded.

"Do you wish to continue today's training, ma'am?" I ventured carefully.

"No."

I nodded and prepared to follow her to wherever she planned to go, but she didn't move. After a moment, she turned around to face me, arms dropping to her waist to knit her hands together in front of her. Crisp, frozen irises locked onto amber ones. "That man's name was Hans Syd. He is your new colleague."

"Sven's replacement?"

"Yes, mostly. He is tasked to watch from afar, and guard against more distant threats. I did not wish to deal with any more incompetence first-hand in the future, and you have proven to be sufficient on your own for managing all of your duties, so I saw no need for a second bodyguard. Do you have any qualms about this?"

"Other than wishing I was notified beforehand, I have none that are of any relevant concern."

She looked down for a moment as she nodded in understanding, but her gaze quickly flicked up again. "Do you trust him?"

"Not in the slightest."

"Good. I don't either."

I raised an eyebrow curiously.

She turned and began to pace slowly. "He's sly—a good asset, yes—and he's skilled at what he does, but I wouldn't trust him with any..._sensitive_ information."

"Hence the distance."

"Precisely."

She looked about at the ruined space we were standing in, with its shard-punctured walls and frost-encrusted floors, and sighed heavily, "we're going to need to find another room."

"Do you have any place in mind?"

"You're the one in charge of security, and these...sessions. It's your decision."

I gave it a moment of thought, "If discretion is—as I assume—of the highest priority, then it may be best for us to conduct our business away from the estate. With Mr. Syd on the watch, we'll need to be somewhere where he doesn't have eyes."

"That does seem ideal." She headed for the door, stopping as her hand curled around the handle. "I'll leave the details to you." She looked at me one last time. "I expect a briefing tomorrow at our appropriated time."

"Yes ma'am."

She nodded to herself, and then spared yet another glance at the iced room. Her shoulders fell a near imperceptible amount, a sense of defeat breaking through her defenses.

"I'll have the senior staff address it," I offered regarding the chamber, hoping to placate her.

"Good. Make sure they're discreet; Anna almost found out about Sven. I can't risk something like that happening again."

I hadn't realized that she had known what Anna had been trying to do that night when I had run into her. Perhaps the redheaded ball of stubborn awkwardness had tried to confront her sister, though I didn't recall her ever doing such a thing. It must have been during the late hours of the night, perhaps right after we had parted ways in that chance meeting. Returning from my thoughts, I nodded stiffly at my charge's instruction and followed her out of the room, the warmth of the hallway blowing into me as I passed the threshold.

— —

The merger was now fast approaching, and was clearly putting Ms. Elsa on edge. For some reason that I was yet to understand, Mr. Syd was now with us as her second bodyguard, a fact that I found to be quite unsettling as this suspicious and untrustworthy individual would now almost constantly be within close proximity of my charge.

He was waiting for us that morning on the roof of the manor, standing beside the car, feet apart, hands clasped before him, with styled auburn hair and absurd sideburns of a burnt orange hue framing a smooth face with a thin, pointed nose and high cheekbones. He sported a sly and confident smile that somehow passed for polite. It was my first time actually seeing him, and I already knew who it was without the need for an introduction. I hated him even more.

He nodded his head in Elsa's direction as the glass doors slid open and admitted us out onto the slightly windy rooftop. I glanced over at her, secretly fuming. She hadn't said a word about this, and from her perfectly composed demeanor, she clearly knew already. I most definitely had qualms about that.

To my secret satisfaction, however, she did not return his nod of greetings as we approached the vehicle, and did not acknowledge him in any way at all. It seemed he really was to be Sven's replacement.

Once we were in the car, I was especially thankful for the soundproof divider that separated us from the front seat, and, consequently, from Mr. Syd. I leaned over toward my charge as the car ascended from the platform to the proper elevation reserved for consumer vehicles, and murmured, "Ms. Elsa, I have reason to suspect that your life is in danger."

"Was that your attempt at a joke?" she snapped.

"No, ma'am. I was referring to the fact that _Mr. Syd_, a man whom both of us are wary of, and whom neither of us trust, is currently a part of your _personal_ guard detail, and piloting a vehicle with us in it about about two kilometers in the air."

She huffed indignantly, "The merger is almost upon us, as I'm sure you know, and I felt the need to bolster my personal security; I believed it worth the risk of having Mr. Syd close by. Even if he does in fact have designs against me, I severely doubt that he will attempt anything. In the case that he still does, that's why you're here."

I frowned at her reasoning. If she suspected Mr. Syd to be against her, why didn't she simply remove him from her staff altogether? Then again, this may be a case of keeping your enemies closer to you than your allies. If she believed this to be the best course of action, then he must be quite a valuable asset indeed, or perhaps he was just someone she would not rather not be on the bad side of. I sincerely hoped it wasn't the latter.

She sighed, "Look, if you do your job correctly, then this shouldn't compromise anything anyway. You don't have to like him, you know."

"If anything, I outright despise him."

She was evidently in an odd mood, as she did not lash out at me for speaking out of turn. She instead merely smiled to herself, with her gaze cast out the window, watching the clouds flash by outside as they were lit up with highlights of gold and orange, and shaded with violet hues and shadows of indigo, reflecting through the window and against Elsa's pale skin. It was a rare sight indeed, and definitely one worth remembering.

I had been watching her for some time, and after awhile, her features reset into their usual mold of indifference as she turned back around. Our eyes met, and she cocked a brow. "Why are you staring at me?"

Caught off guard by her bluntness, I looked away, "Forgive me, ma'am, I meant nothing by it."

"You didn't answer my question." I turned back around, to find her now staring at me, expectantly, and by her tone, also slightly irritated. I was grasping for a credible response to use when we suddenly began to descend. A large helipad was visible below, and the sprawling city lay even further down.

Elsa sighed and shook her head, "You are a man who always has a valid reason for everything you do, and I am sure that this is no different." The door was opened by an attendant, and we stepped out of the sleek, black vehicle. Elsa glanced over at Mr. Syd, who had already left the vehicle and was coming around to take his place at her left. She spun around back to me, her bangs bouncing, the morning light shining brightly against pale blonde hair, and glinting like the shine of snow crystals against deep icy blue irises. She huffed, "I expect to be informed later."

"Yes ma'am," I muttered.

There wasn't much else that could have been said at that point. There was, however, much more that could have been thought on the matter. The prospect of voicing the true reasons behind my lingering gaze was almost as frightening as the consequences of lying and having her see right through it. The fact that Mr. Syd's presence was influential enough to convince her that the matter should be discussed at a later time likely implied that she was taking this quite seriously. For the first time while on the job, I was at a loss for what to do. While having her turn my understanding of reality on its head when I discovered her powers had greatly affected me, I hadn't entirely lost my way; we had resorted to training and lessons, but with this, there were too many factors, and too many of them were volatile. There was no telling how she would react to the truth, there were too many ways for it all to go wrong—and in some of those cases, disastrously so—and yet the unbidden and preposterous chance that she would actually react positively came to mind as well, likely brought forth by a resilient force of hope that refused to die.

The indecision warred within me throughout the course of the entire day, and for quite certainly the one and only time in my life, I actually appreciated the presence of Mr. Syd, a despised human shield that stood between me and my dreaded fate.

The moment inevitably came that afternoon when the curiosity or anxiety that was driving Elsa couldn't stand to wait any longer, and I was called into her office, alone.

I entered quietly, Mr. Syd closing the door behind me, and stood before my charge. She was not sitting at the desk as I had been expecting, but instead stood before it, arms folded. I clasped my hands before me, "How may I be of assistance, ma'am?"

"The matter from this morning," she began, "you did not answer my question."

"I assure you that it is of no consequence."

"And yet you refuse to tell me."

I was silent after that, stalling, still unsure of how to proceed. She exhaled and approached, standing only about a foot from me, forcing her to crane her neck to look me in the eyes. Despite the more pronounced difference in stature, she appeared no less intimidating, and perhaps even more so.

"Why does it interest you?" I blurted.

The forward question had silenced the young woman, her coercive and dominant demeanor crashing down like a flawed house of cards, and I saw that it was all just a part of her mask. Nervous energy literally sparked off of her as frost, and she dropped her gaze. "As I have told you before, you're the only one whom I can actually and fully trust, and I want you to be able to tell me anything. Honestly, I had simply hoped I could get to know you better...and perhaps even go as far as become friends."

"I...don't quite understand, Ms. Elsa."

She frowned and shook her head, "I don't blame you; other than dealing with others in the business world, I don't really have much of any experience with social interaction, or with any sort of relationship that was not grounded entirely in self-interest. There was never really a place for it," she began to tense up, and the room chilled steadily, "not since the accident." She saw my melancholy gaze, and shook her head, "not that one, this was before my parents passed, years before." Her arms snaked over her stomach, clutching at each other, and she was silent. I was beginning to wonder if she was finished when she started to speak again, her voice weak and vulnerable, "I've never told anyone about this, partly because it was not something I liked to think about, and partly because of my curse."

She took a deep breath and swallowed, "I was eight at the time, and Anna was only five. She knew about my powers back then."

I furrowed my brow in confusion; Anna most certainly did not know about them now. Elsa characteristically returned my expression with an impatient glare, "It will all make sense by the end, assuming you can believe it."

With that foreboding note hanging in the air, she continued, "We had shared a room then—it was more for the comfort the company provided than out of necessity—and Anna would often wake me up at insanely early hours whenever the northern lights shone brightly in the sky, and then beg me to 'do the magic' for her." She smiled wistfully at the memory. I began to doubt that this tale was going to end on a very good note.

"So we'd go out into the ballroom, or the great hall, or anywhere else that was big enough, and then we'd play in the snow, my snow. The day it happened was just like that one; we had gone out into the great hall that time, and began to play, building snowmen and slides, having snowball fights, and even sliding along on the iced floor. Anna had an idea for a new game to play, where she'd jump into the air and land on the piles of snow I conjured, and then hop from one to the next and so on. She keep going higher, and higher. She was fearless, smiling wide, having the time of her life. She started going faster; I couldn't keep up. I called out for her to slow down. I was afraid she would fall, that she would get hurt, and then...I slipped. She had jumped, the magic hit her in the head and she fell, landing in a snowdrift we had been playing in before. She wouldn't wake up, and she was so cold, I actually felt it. I cried out and our parents rushed in, found us there, surrounded by my ice, holding Anna."

She stopped again, on the verge of tears, barely managing to keep it all in. With a shaky breath she tried to go on, "she ended up in a coma, and we feared she would never wake up. My parents finally realized on that day how dangerous I really was, that I was not gifted, but cursed, and that I needed to be remedied as soon as possible. They took me out of school, had my lessons be conducted at the manor, and made me swear to never use my powers until I learned to control them. As if it recoiled at the idea, my ice became erratic, volatile, freezing everything I touched, getting even harder to control with every attempt I made to do so. I found out that gloves helped somewhat, with the freezing touch at least, but it was the only comfort left to me." She stared down at the white ones she was currently wearing, transfixed by the pair of wet spots marring its surface. She wiped at her eyes and sniffed. I offered her my handkerchief and she took it gingerly, before dabbing at her face with it, staining it with mascara. She looked down at it with disappointment.

"About two years later, Anna awoke from her coma. She smiled when she saw me, and seemed unperturbed by the streak of gray that was now in her hair, but when my parents came in, she didn't recognize them. She didn't remember anything about them, or anything else at all..." Her hands clenched the cloth tightly, "Except for me. Unfortunately, almost all of her memories, even the ones we shared together, were still gone. She remembered my name and my birthday, my favorite color, my likes and dislikes, mannerisms, and so many more insignificant little bits of trivia, but not a single thing about ice or my powers."

"She had to be homeschooled for a while after that along with me. She never seemed to mind, she didn't remember any of her old friends anyway, and I was there. That always seemed to be enough for her, or at least sometimes. I had begun to draw away from her, from everyone, partly because I was already getting used to doing things on my own, but also because I knew that if I stayed too close to anyone, I would end up hurting them."

Her arms wrapped around herself as she hunched forward, like her chest was going to explode.

"I put Anna in a coma. I disgraced my parents, my family, I've ruined homes and lives, even toppled a building, and I...killed Sven."

She hung her head guiltily, and leaned into me. Her cold skin felt like that of a corpse. Pale hands clutched at my suit jacket, and the very lively softness of her form pressed against me. My arms rose and wrapped around her instinctively, protectively hugging her as she began to sob into my chest. A thought came to me, and I smiled to myself, "It's going to take a lot more than some snow and ice to hurt me, Ms. Elsa".

Her response was muffled by my jacket.

I looked down at the back of her head, "pardon?"

She shifted, resting a cheek against me, "just Elsa, please, at least when there's no one else around."

"Very well then, Elsa." It felt strange to say it, but it rolled off my tongue in a very pleasing way.

Her arms circled me, returning the hug. I knew not how long we stood there, but I didn't really care; I wasn't exactly anxious to let go of her.

She sighed, "You don't have to answer the question. I'm sorry."

"It's fine, you have more than enough reason to be on edge."

"Not with you. Had you of planned to kill me or harm me, you would have done it a long time ago, and if you are still trying to after all this time, I don't think that you're really much of a threat."

"Very true."

She drew away from me slowly, and met my eyes as she retreated back to the desk. "Thank you for hearing me out."

I shrugged and smiled slightly, "what are friends for?"

She returned the expression and looked down, hiding her eyes with her bangs. Idly, I noticed that the room began to feel warmer.

— —

**A/N: **Trivia bit: Syd actually means "south" in Danish. Denmark is also most likely where the Southern Isles would be located if they existed.


	4. Trust Exercise

**A/N: I regretfully announce that I am moving from a one-week update cycle to a two-week update cycle. When I started posting this story, I already had a buffer of the first three chapters, and with this chapter being uploaded, I no longer have one. With college, homework, other projects, sleep, and Borderlands, there simply isn't enough time for me to manage quality with such frequent updates. On the plus side, the chapters may end up becoming longer because of the extra time so yay! I'm just letting you all know now so that you don't have to shed any tears when there's no update next Wednesday. Please don't cry. You'll make me cry. Thank you, and enjoy the chapter.**

— —

**Chapter IV: Trust Exercise**

I knew something was different ever since this morning. It wasn't an immediate change, nothing that would be obviously seen or identified by the eye or the ear. It was subtle, impossible to place, but it was most assuredly there, and it had permeated my surroundings ever since we left the manor. When we had boarded our transport at the usual time, no one had seemed particularly distressed or agitated. Elsa wasn't wearing her shades, and Mr. Syd was as quiet and composed as he always seemed to be.

The day itself was quite uneventful as well, though I still felt on edge the entire time as I stood guard outside the office, scanning, with Mr. Syd beside me, looking preoccupied. That was actually rather strange; Syd had his own mask that was perhaps worn even more tightly than mine or Elsa's, and it was coming undone. With that realization, my agitation expanded tenfold. If Mr. Syd was on edge, there was either a threat about to come in from a long way away, or his true colors were about to burn through.

I turned to him confrontationally, hoping that the case wasn't the latter. "What did you hear?"

He glanced over and up at me, eyebrows raised in passive surprise, "I'm impressed that you picked up on that."

"What did you hear?" I repeated more sternly.

He turned his back to the wall and leaned up against it, arms folded, "I'm not certain about anything yet, but it seems that South Isles is just as shady as Ms. Arendelle had suspected them to be, if not more so," he looked back at me, "It seems we have a reason to be on guard."

"We _always_ have a reason to be on guard." I corrected with a glare.

Appearing somewhat chastised, Mr. Syd looked away again.

We were silent for a time, until I broke it with another question, "Have you informed our charge?"

"Why would I tell her something she already knows?"

"It would solidify her suspicions."

Syd shrugged, "If we do what we're paid to do, it shouldn't really matter whether she knows."

"Ms. Elsa would hardly agree with that."

"Do you really think you know her that well?"

"I think that you're in no position to argue, newbie."

I debated whether not I should explain to him why it would be best to tell her; not saying anything and pissing Elsa off would be a brilliant way to get the rat fired, and yet it was a potential security risk to leave her out of the loop, a fact I had learned too well in the past.

— —

"Ma'am, may I have a word?" Syd asked, looking sidelong at the empowered, blonde executive as she paced along next to him.

"Depends on if it's actually relevant."

"I think you'll find that it is."

We were on the helipad at the manor, and Mr. Syd was speaking urgently to Elsa as the three of us walked away from the car. The manor's automated doors opened as we passed between them, and the chill from the outside followed us in.

"What is it?" Elsa snapped.

Right as Mr. Syd opened his mouth to speak, he was knocked off-balance by a sudden blur of orange. He landed on his back, and stared up into the wide and apologetic eyes of none other than Anna, who laughed nervously as she sat astride him.

"Oh! Sorry! Really, sorry, I wasn't looking where I was...going..." She trailed off and stared down at him for an oddly long moment. "Hi! I'm Anna, by the way—I don't think we've properly met, and I guess we still haven't because, you know, uh..." She attempted to extricate herself from their awkward position, stumbling a bit, but managing to stay upright with the support of Syd's arm. After rising to her full height and dusting herself off, she stretched out a hand to try and help him up, but he was already halfway there, and she ended up awkwardly retracting the gesture. "You're...handsome- I mean Hans, right?"

Caught off-guard by the sudden compliment, he took a moment to respond, "Umm, yes, Hans Syd, ma'am." He held out a hand for her to shake.

"Oh, just call me Anna, really, I'm not that big on formalities," she shook his hand belatedly, "or social things in general..." They shared small smiles before Anna noticed her sister passing by as if she weren't even there, and perked up. "Hi!" Elsa didn't turn, or seem to acknowledge her at all, but Anna still waved half-heartedly at her back anyway, hand drooping sadly.

After a moment, Elsa did look behind her, lighting Anna's flame of hope right before dousing it again as her cold eyes fell on Mr. Syd, "We will speak later," she said to him.

He gave a curt nod, "Yes, ma'am." He glanced back at Anna, giving her a sad smile before heading off down another hall toward whatever dark recess he always holed himself up in while at the manor. I followed Elsa, feeling torn between the two estranged sisters as we left Anna standing alone in the hall. A faint shine crossed the corner of my eye, but I could not tell if it was simply a trick of the light, or tears glistening in her eyes.

Elsa and I turned the corner and walked down the hall towards one of the elevators. It was once again just the two of us.

"I know of the matter which Mr. Syd wanted to speak to you about." I commented.

"And yet you refrained from saying anything?"

"Mr. Syd had beaten me to it."

"Hm."

"He has found that South Isles Corp has an ulterior motive for completing the merger with Frost Industries."

"I figured as much, though I'm surprised that he decided to inform us."

I nodded in agreement, "it's hard to tell whether he's just doing an excellent job of fooling us or if he's actually on our side."

"I was referring more to the fact that the Syd family owns South Isles."

I was surprised. "And yet you hired Mr. Syd anyway?"

"It was exactly why I hired him to begin with, his life could be used as leverage if things were to go badly."

I raised my eyebrows, "Have things ever gone that badly?"

Her arms folded across her stomach. "Yes," she muttered impassively.

We had reached the elevator and her pale hand shot out and tapped the down button before my own hand was halfway there, and I faltered. The doors opened shortly after, and we stepped inside, heading for the ground floor.

Ice blue eyes looked over and up at mine, "I presume you've located a suitable place for-" I stopped her with a hand, taking her by surprise and setting her mask askew; her bright eyes widened and her painted lips parted.

"The elevators are monitored."

She repositioned her façade into its usual frigid scowl and pushed my hand away as she turned back around to face the doors, waiting for them to open with folded arms, "well now they're _definitely_ suspicious," she retorted accusingly.

"As their employer, the activities you engage in during your time are none of their concern-"

"Stop talking, Bjorgman."

"Yes, ma'am."

Elsa charged into the hallway before the lift doors were even halfway open, and I struggled to follow; she was surprisingly fast for someone who never really exercised. On the plus side, I no longer had to purposely slow my gait to match her usual pace. It was unprecedented though, and that worried me. Change brings on the unknown, and the unknown often brings on trouble.

She burst through the large, heavy oaken front doors into the summer air, allowing the mild northern balm to blast in like a wave, and descended the wide stone stairs that led down to the traffic circle, where a black sedan was waiting. She entered the back seat without a word, and I signaled to the chauffeur, who was already waiting in the driver's seat, to step out. I caught the door as he opened it and entered once he passed me on his way back into the manor.

The car was quiet except for the soft hum of the electric engine as I started it up, and I proceeded to navigate towards the public road.

I glanced at her through the rear-view mirror. "You seem unusually hurried."

"Do I?" she was hardly listening, and staring out the window. Her eyes were distant and her knee was bouncing anxiously.

"Yes."

She didn't respond. She likely didn't even hear me in her preoccupied state.

The rest of the drive was silent, both inside and outside the car as we drove along unpaved, urban backroads, across plains, up hills, over bridges, all dusted with frost. It reminded me of the years I had spent in the wilderness, with the seemingly endless expanse of nature as my sole companion, both my greatest friend and my worst enemy. The feeling of nostalgia became stronger as the incline of the road became steeper. We were nearing the North Mountain. I began to recognize little landmarks, small, subtle cues and distinguished details one would only begin to notice after years of wandering amongst the frigid pines. I began to smile despite myself. It was the one place where I could escape the horrors of my past, and, more importantly, the one place where no one would ever find us.

I parked the car along the side of the road. The change in motion and the silencing of the engine's hum broke Elsa from her stupor, prompting her to look up and examine her surroundings. Her brows furrowed in unamused confusion, "why are we parked in the middle of the woods?"

I closed my door as I stepped clear of its path and reached for Elsa's, only to find that she had exited on her own, ice-blue eyes still searching about before looking up and locking onto mine.

I began to walk backwards towards the trees, "The location for our sessions can't be accessed from the road, we'll have to walk from here."

I could hear her sigh audibly from behind me as I turned and headed toward the east, navigating around and through the forest of pine trees like the shelves of an old, well-visited library.

I glanced back at my charge frequently, making sure that she was keeping up through the rising drifts of snow. She was doing surprisingly well, and if my eyes weren't fooling me, it almost looked as if she were walking atop the powdery surface instead of sinking into it.

"How much farther? We're already in the middle of nowhere."

"About another mile."

She groaned again, and I looked back at her. "Consider it as part of your training," I suggested

"What the hell does excessive cardio have to do with reigning in an ice curse?" She snapped, glaring daggers.

I turned back with a shrug, "endurance, I guess..."

She inhaled deeply, "There's a significant difference between physical endurance and mental endurance, and-" I silenced her rant by raising my hands in placatory surrender, and she closed her mouth, appearing unsatisfied.

We reached the edge of the clearing not long afterwards. It was relatively small, perhaps about half the size of a soccer field, and was covered with a clean and white plain of fresh snow. A modest yet sizable log cabin stood along the opposite edge of the clearing, and a thin creek separated us from the small field, trickling along from the summit of the mountain.

Elsa stepped onto the creek, which froze below her, allowing her to cross onto the frozen field. She took in the treeless expanse, turning as she went, her steps not even leaving footprints in the drifts. She nodded to herself, "This will work nicely."

"The presence of the snow should help accidents appear less conspicuous as well," I added, walking carefully across her frozen, slippery path, and trudging heavily through the drifts towards the cabin.

She looked at me curiously as I passed her, "where are you going?"

I looked back at her, equally confused, "Inside? It's obviously below freezing, and we've been outside for quite a while."

She gazed at me sideways with a humored smirk, "I've already told you I don't feel the cold."

I sighed and stopped, standing stiffly where I was, hands in my pockets. I wasn't about to admit it, but I was freezing my ass off. It seems I had been gone from here longer than I thought. I glanced back at her to see that she was still smiling, now with her hands folded at her waist, fingers intertwined in a way that was normal only for her. I began to feel oddly self-conscious.

"What is it?" I asked, sensing some missed joke.

"You can go inside if you want to."

"As your bodyguard, I should be near you at all times in order to ensure your health and safety-"

"There's no one out here," she laughed, "if someone would be able to come up here after us, then you wouldn't have done a very good job of finding us a private space. Besides," she conjured a wickedly sharp shard of ice that spun slowly in her palm, "I'm not exactly defenseless."

My eyebrows raised, "Well, you've definitely improved."

She beamed and looked down shyly at the revolving weapon, her bangs hiding her eyes. I noticed a faint splash of color across her cheeks. She peeked out from her hair, "You should go inside, really. You're obviously cold."

"I'm used to it, I used to live up here for quite a while."

"Oh," she replied with widened eyes, it was apparently news to her.

"You were not aware of this?" I asked slowly.

"I-I was, I just hadn't expected you to...take me here."

I shrugged, "It was the first thing that came to mind, and I figured that it would suit our needs quite well."

"It will, thank you." She dismissed the shard and exhaled, still smiling, "shall we begin?"

— —

"I knew it!" the fur-clad girl shot to her feet with a sudden burst of energy that contrasted greatly with the apathy she had been displaying over the past few days. Olaf and Marshall looked up from the journal and watched her as she began to run about the space, eyes alight as she began picking up a variety of items that were scattered around the fire-lit cave.

Marshall frowned in puzzlement, "I thought you had given up on this?"

She had set a large pack upright and was attempting to stuff rations into it, "I was only tired of reading the stupid thing. C'mon you two, let's get packing!"

Olaf stood up, also confused. "Where are we going?"

Anna whirled on him, hands splayed in exasperation, "To the cabin! Duh!"

His arms went to his hips as he frowned, "Uh huh, and where is that?"

Anna stopped, "umm...on the North Mountain."

"_Where_ on the North Mountain?"

Anna pursed her lips and squinted before jumping up again with a grin to continue her frenzied packing, "yeah, we'll just figure that out when we get there! I mean it shouldn't be too hard to find, it's just a cabin sitting out there...in the woods...which is really big... and has lots of trees..." her vigor drained along with her speed, and she flopped down face-first onto her packed bedroll with a groan.

Olaf laid an arm on her shoulder sympathetically, "Don't give up completely, we haven't finished the journal yet."

Her head popped up, "you're right!"

She hopped back up to her feet and pointed at Olaf and Marshall, "You two keep reading!" She then turned around and took off out of the cavern, alarming her two companions.

Olaf shouted after her, "hey! Where are you going? Anna?" He almost lost his balance when the book was shoved into his chest by Marshall's hand as the hulking man rushed past him briskly, "and where are _you_ going?"

Marshall stopped at the cave's opening to tie on his snow boots, "After her. You keep reading." He set off into the frozen wilderness and out of sight, leaving a frowning Olaf alone in their camp. After a long moment, he shook his head and sighed, and opened the leather-bound moleskine, flipping back to the page that they were on.

— —

"Shall we begin?"

"Of course." I came forward to stand about five paces from her, and then folded my arms. "Let's see if you can reform that shard again."

She nodded and focused on her hands, which were held out before her, palms up. Cyan and cerulean swirls formed and began to take shape, elongating slowly and cleanly as the construct solidified, and new, even layers of crystalline frost were extruded and hardened. The process was slow at first, controlled—which was good— but also restrained. The rod began to wobble ominously.

"Elsa, I think that's-"

Ice lashed out towards me into the shape a massive javelin. The tip barely missed, and would have gone straight through the relatively flimsy flesh, muscle and bone in my chest if I hadn't managed to dodge it. I heard a piercing scream of fear and pain, and the deadly rod cracked and twisted hideously before me, falling to the ground where it shattered against the snow, brittle and wicked.

I looked up from the pieces to see a terrified Elsa with her shoulders hunched and her hands held out in midair, stuck halfway between covering her mouth and reaching out towards me. Her breathing was heavy and she looked to be on the verge of tears. I took a step forward and she scurried back a few with a whimper, like a frightened animal.

"It's alright, Elsa. I'm alright." I came forward again and she leaned away, but her feet stayed where they were. A shaky hand hovered near my right arm as if to gingerly touch at something, and I looked at it to see a splash of red underneath a frayed slit in the fabric of my suit. The cut was long and bled moderately, but to call it a wound would be exaggerating. It was also numb; I hadn't even known it was there until I had seen it. I looked back at Elsa to see tears running uninhibited down her face.

"Seriously, it's fine, it doesn't hurt. I can't even feel it."

Her eyes screwed shut and her tears suddenly began to freeze, ice crusting over her cheeks and lashes. She tried to open her eyes, but they were now frozen shut. She cried out in panic and stumbled, new ice forming over the snow wherever she stepped. I sprung to action, and grabbed her by the waist to stop from doing something she'd regret. She began to sob without tears while I attempted to quiet her. Cold, pale hands clutched tightly at the lapels of my suit jacket. It would be wrinkled, but I didn't care.

"Let's go inside, just hold onto me, alright?"

The now blind woman nodded fitfully and pressed into me further as I made my way towards the cabin.

We came in through the front door and entered the sparsely furnished living room. A fireplace was set into the wall to the right with a small couch and an armchair opposite from it across a plain, rough rug of twine. A small wooden coffee table sat atop it in the middle. It was all just as I had left it, the only indication of the time that had passed being the thick coating of dust that had accumulated over every surface.

After untangling my charge from my chest with some difficulty, I laid her down on the couch while she calmed, and turned toward the cold and empty hearth to light it with one of the matches sitting by the small wood pile adjacent to it. The foul smell of burning dust filled my nostrils as the thick smoke rose up through the clay and stone chimney.

I turned back to my charge to find that she had calmed down considerably. Her breath was so even that I thought she might be asleep.

"Elsa?"

"I'm awake." Her voice was monotonous, resigned.

"Stay by the fire, the ice should melt soon-"

I was interrupted by a humorless chuckle from the blinded woman as she slowly sat up on the couch, "there's no point. It doesn't thaw. It never does."

"I don't understand."

she whipped around in the direction of my voice. "It's cursed!" she spat, "Why do you think they had to cart it all away from the office? Why do you think Sven is still frozen?"

I stood and came towards her, and she stiffened with uncertainty when she heard my approach.

"Perhaps your ice is...enchanted," I conceded, "but I think there's still a way. Some of that ice _did_ thaw, you know."

Her brows pushed together in confusion.

"The floor of your study was damp after the incident, Elsa."

She frowned further and tried to rub at her eyes, "that doesn't make any sense."

"There's a lot about your powers that we don't know. We can't just resign ourselves to our limited observations."

The snarky retort I was expecting never came; she merely sighed, and asked lamely, "do you have an ice pick? Or something?"

I examined her quizzically, "As it so happens, yes, I do...though I don't think that would be the best way to go about handling your predicament."

"Do you have any better ideas?"

"No, ma'am."

She sighed again at my response as I went into another room to fetch the requested item along with some other things that I thought might be necessary precautions, such as a first aid kit; it was going to be a very delicate procedure. I heard her stand, and came out to see her fumbling her way around the room. "Ms. Elsa, perhaps you should stayed seated-"

"You're a bodyguard, not a babysitter, and I'm not a child. I can handle this just fine. I've been on my own for a long time. Also, we're in private company, so there's no need for the formalities. I've told you this already."

I exhaled as I watched her cross about the space, her steadiness and confidence growing with each step. "Old habits, I guess."

She laid her folded hands on the back of the couch and managed to look straight at me. "This actually isn't that bad." She straightened again and paced about in the small open space between the back of the couch and the small kitchen table behind it, "not having to see their hideous faces when I look at them would make it so much easier to deal with the board members."

"True," I admitted with a shrug and am unseen smirk. She laughed, freely. It wasn't forced or false, and it was beautiful. I hadn't ever heard her do that even on a good day. The grim and serious masquerade party that was her life was not going on up here on this mountain, in this kingdom of isolation. The masks were thrown aside the moment we crossed that creek.

Elsa was facing away from me when she stopped her pacing. A curiously wary hand rose to her face, and I faintly heard the crackling of ice.

"Elsa?"

"It's thawing..." She stood for a moment in shock before vigorously rubbing at her eyes. Bits and pieces of ice fell and made tiny droplet-sized stains on the wood floor of the cabin.

Her head whipped around, and brilliant blue eyes looked into mine. They were full of excitement and relief, but clouded by fear and confusion. "It's thawing now, but...why? What's different?" The orbs were cast down at her hands, and when she spoke again, her voice was hardly above a whisper "is the rest of it still there?"

"The rest of what?" I asked

The question made her jump. Whatever this was about, it was clearly something big.

"Nothing. Nothing."

"Which means it's something bad."

"It's _nothing_."

"The last time you neglected to tell me about 'nothing', somebody _died._"

She flinched at the word. It was harsh, but it had to be. I needed to know.

"I can't...I can't tell you."

"Is someone pressuring you?" I found myself standing up straight and full of tension.

She shook her head, "No, no. It's not a who, and that's as far as you should be concerned. Enough of this."

I stepped forward adamantly, "On the contrary, if you-"

"I said enough!"

The blast of freezing wind was unexpected by both parties, and sent me flying. I landed hard on the ground about a meter from where I was. When I sat up, Elsa's expression was identical to the one she had worn outside. I now recognized it as regret. Her hands balled into fists as she tucked them into herself, and her gaze dropped the moment I tried to make eye contact with her.

"This was a mistake. I've already hurt you twice in one day. I'm getting _worse_."

"We're training, and this is nothing. I'm still alive, so I'm fine."

Her eyes squeezed shut, and she shook her head sadly, "you're an idiot."

"I prefer the term resilient."

She turned away from me and murmured something I couldn't hear.

"Don't run from this, Elsa."

'Why not? It's been working out for years."

"Has it really?" I stepped forward again. "Is insomnia 'working out?' Are all those incidents that you spoke about when we began this—those gas leaks and faulty wiring—is that 'working out?'"

"I'm still alive after all of it, so yes, it is."

"Elsa, that's not-"

"You're such a _fucking_ idiot! How can you think it's ok for you to voluntarily put yourself in harm's way? Stop trying to help me, for your own sake." She was crying again.

"You know I can't do that." I came forward. "I'm your bodyguard, that's what I'm supposed to do. Besides, aren't you the one who asked me to be your friend?"

"So this is my fault?"

"I'm not blaming anyone. You're blaming yourself."

"You're missing the point. Anna had an excuse, but you-"

"Wait, what about Anna?"

Her face contorted into fury, but it was directed entirely at herself. She exhaled sharply, reminiscent of a bull. "She doesn't know. She doesn't know the reason why she should stay away, but _you_," a finger jabbed at my chest, "you've seen me for the monster that I really am, a callous bitch cursed with powers as cold and frozen as my heart, and yet you still..."

I was glaring at her. "Stop it."

The smile she wore was completely cynical, but also slightly unhinged, "can't stand to hear the truth, can you? Well, you can delude yourself for as long as you want, but that doesn't change _anything!_"

"You're the one deluding yourself, Elsa. You're not a monster."

"Then what am I?!" She lashed out, throwing ice into the wall and cracking the logs, "what else could I possibly be?!"

"You're Elsa. You're human-"

"No, no, I'm not!"

"You're human, and you make mistakes."

"Mistakes are not allowed."

"Mistakes are unavoidable," Pained, blue irises looked into mine, disbelieving, unsure, and full of self-hate. I continued, "and they don't make you any less human—much the opposite, in fact. You're also not heartless; I've seen plenty of evidence of that."

She turned away from me, and I planted my feet stubbornly as I folded my arms, "you don't have to believe me. It doesn't change the fact that it's true."

She said nothing for a long time, and then she whispered in a pleading voice, "Why can't you understand that being near me is nothing but pain?"

"Life is pain, and I've lived with it for years."

She frowned, "That's not..."

I merely smiled. She was deflating now, but she still wasn't convinced. That was alright though, we had plenty of time to do something about it.

"We _can _gain control, but you have to believe that if it's going to work."

She stared at me for a long time, and I held her piercing gaze. She broke the silence, "I'm starting to get the feeling that you're not entirely who you say you are."

I smirked, "everyone has their secrets, Elsa."

She sighed, and as it faded, the air became stagnant and awkward. She broke it quickly afterwards, and walked around me to get to the first aid kit, which she opened and began to prepare. She held out a hand, "your arm."

"You needn't trouble yourself with it, I can attend to it later."

"I'm the one who hurt you, so I'm the one who's going to fix it, now give me your arm."

I came around and sat on the couch to give her access to the sleeve. She grimaced empathetically as she examined the cut. "Are you sure it doesn't hurt?" she asked warily.

"I hardly feel a thing. I've had worse though, much worse."

"During your military career?" Elsa asked as she dabbed at the cut with a peroxide soaked piece of cotton

"Yes, though it wasn't the only time. That's all I really want to say about it."

She nodded, and smiled shyly as she began to place a bandage over the injury, "fair enough."

I looked down at it after she finished. The large band-aid was blue, and had reindeer on it.


	5. Foul and Fair

**Chapter V: Foul and Fair**

Snow is clean when it is untouched, smoothly mimicking the surfaces that it buries, uninterrupted and consistent. Snow is dirty when it is trod upon, disturbed by the boot, rugged and solid, as it plows gracelessly through the virgin plain, leaving it ruffled, disheveled, and mixed in with stray bits of grass and earth, mashed into slush and stained with brown.

In this world, ice and snow rule as one with the wind and sky. Blizzards and snowfall dance upon the heavy wintry drifts like nobles at a royal ball. The ground as it once was is never visible. No one can see it from under the layer of white, and none take the time to look for it, for what purpose would that serve? The dirt and rock below are nothing more than painful reminders of a time long past and long gone. There is never time to waste in the frozen air, where frostbite, hypothermia, and all the other cold scythes of death can claim lives in minutes.

Truly, time was always of the essence, both to the scavengers of the white wastes, and to the anxious and determined woman who trudged along up the side of the North mountain. The air was calm, a rare occurrence in those times; there wasn't even a flake of sleet in the sky. Anna basked in the relative warmth granted by the wind's absence, and after crossing a rather deep section of the rise that she had been ascending, just barely managed to see the small, flattened area now before her, a placid plane with a sheer, snowy cliff that dropped off hardly a meter from where she was standing. She continued to the edge fearlessly, and looked down.

Sharp and rough slopes awaited below, the jagged stone of the mountain tearing through the snow and ice like the knives that they were. As the base neared, the steepness lessened, and the cliffside began to become more tame and less treacherous before being once again swallowed up by the winter's pale, powdery skin. A ways off, the struggling forest of pine gave way to a small series of rectangular structures, varying in height and other details. A few of them had collapsed under their frigid burdens, but others seemed to have been destroyed by other, unknown causes. These mysteries were the earliest damages.

Beyond the varied assortment, past roads winding through fenced-in fields of cold, dead emptiness interrupted by small lumps of snow that marked the corpses of livestock, lay the edge of a great estate, surrounded by a grand, half-buried, and presumably tall fence of beige stone and gray mortar. Behind it lay nothing but winter and its cruelties: pillars, spikes, and the flash-frozen shapes of cars and the dead. Even further in the distance, just slightly visible through the billowing curtains of icy precipitation, stood the remains of a mansion, with its walls of bricked, beige stone, its roofs of gray, flat shingles, and its windows of once immaculate glass. The manor was now pierced and rent by even larger pillars and spikes that wormed out from the edifice in violent, angular, and twisted curves, giving it all a rotten and diseased appearance.

After tearing her eyes away from the darkness of the previous era, Anna looked up along the clean and white slope before her, breath fogging in the frigid air. The incline continued upwards at a manageable angle to the right of the small plateau. Beyond it lay her destination, or so she hoped; she was finally starting to realize that she had once again acted without fully thinking everything through. Even if Kristoff actually was on this mountain, where within the snow and the trees would he be?

Anna cursed to herself, as she was unable to find an answer to that question. A glance behind her showed her path through the snow, descending down the mountain as it faded into the distance. She had come too far to just back out without even attempting to look for him.

As she turned back around with replenished resolve, she caught a movement out of the corner of her eye and whipped back around, her plaited hair billowing outward as it trailed along. Some distance back, the figure of a man—clothed in black and with the hood of his coat raised—was visible, and seemed to be following her tracks.

Cursing again, Anna turned tail and took off as fast as she could manage towards the rise in the snow. While her sprinting was still relatively slow in the knee-deep drifts, it was faster than the man was walking, and that was all that mattered. Immediately after that thought had flashed through her head, she tripped; her boot had caught on part of the icy powder and pitched her forward.

She hit the ground face-first with a yelp and sank a little before regaining her balance and struggling to pull herself up. At least a full thirty seconds had elapsed by the time she was up and running again.

"damn my klutziness..."

With the nagging feeling of the man's approach spurring her on with fear, the redhead's escape became more erratic, and even less dignified, as she made countless unnecessary turns and attempted decoys as adrenaline and instinct started to take over.

The slope widened out, making way for needled trees and long-dead bushes. Anna meandered quickly through the forest, as there was less snow here for her to sink in. She attempted to leap over a bush, but her coat snagged on the brambles and reunited her freckled face with the cold ground. She spat out the now half-melted ice, and froze. Faintly, she could hear the powdery crunch of approaching footfalls on snow.

"Shit!" Her teeth grinded together as she clenched them, and she scrambled up from the ground, pulling a 6-inch serrated combat knife out from its sheath on her thigh as she turned around and stood up into a crouch, eyes watching, blade at the ready, completely prepared to face her aggressor. When the world has died and what's left of the populace is struggling to survive, anyone who isn't you could be your enemy.

Anna darkly wondered what he would do with her if he managed to overpower her. Would he simply kill her and relieve her corpse of its supplies? Would he just mug her? Or would he take her and strip-

"Anna!"

She recognized the voice through the haze of her morbid thoughts, and exhaled the breath that she didn't realize she was holding.

"Marshall."

While his approach drastically increased her chances of survival, it also hindered the progress of her mission. She had to find Kristoff. She had to find Elsa. She could not turn back. Repeating her goals to herself, she turned and kept running.

"Anna! Wait!"

"You'll never take me alive!" It wasn't exactly the most fitting response, but Anna didn't really care; it was the first thing that crossed her mind. She ran harder, but a look back revealed that she wasn't losing him. She growled in frustration.

_Damn his fitness!_

"You're not going to find him like this! We need to go back!" Marshall yelled back at her.

"We...have to at least try!" Anna was losing her breath. She hadn't ever run this much in her life, and it was taking its toll. Adrenaline could only do so much. She stumbled again, falling to her knees, and Marshall started to catch up. With another frustrated growl, she tossed the knife down into the snow, and started packing part of the frozen ground into a ball.

The large man sighed, "You're wasting your ti-" a blur of white impacted his face with a heavy crack, and powdery flakes exploded around him while a more solid chunk of ice bounced away, spattered with crimson, flecks of it rocketing off as the frozen lump spun through the air. Marshall went down gracelessly with a flop, and groaned.

Anna stopped, cringing empathetically, "Oops! Sorry, sorry. I'm sorry. I didn't-", she cleared her throat and re-steeled herself, "I'm not going back—I'm staying here. I'm not gonna leave without even trying to look for him."

Marshall sat up, nursing his face. He found blood on his lip, and glanced up at the determined redhead before closing his slightly open mouth into a frown. "Look around you." He gestured to their surroundings. They were on a narrow, snow-covered backroad with forests of tall, coniferous trees on either side. "You're not going to find anything, and we'll freeze to death long before we get to search the whole place." He stood up, and continued, "In the journal, he said the cabin was at least a mile from any road or path. We're not going to just stumble upon it."

Anna shrugged wildly, "Maybe we'll...find a clue or something!"

Marshall rolled his eyes in exasperation, and placed his hands on his hips, "Anna-"

"Look, we're already out here! I'm not gonna just turn back." Her stubborn face glared intensely at him from across the snowy ten meter gap between them. A sudden gust of wind from the south blew her bangs to her left, and brought her braided pigtails to life as belligerent, hissing rattlesnakes that gave semblance to Medusa.

Marshall exhaled sharply, the breath expelling from his nostrils like an angry bull. "Am I going to have to forcibly carry you back?"

"Am I going to have to bite your head off?"

He gave her a look, which she then mocked, and sighed again. "Fine, but when I say we turn around, we turn around."

Anna pointed a pair of finger guns at him as she walked backwards in an attempt to be cool. "You got it, chief! Woah-" a patch of ice sent her down onto her rear, and directly on her tailbone. "Gah! Oh, damn everything!"

She was still grumbling and struggling as Marshall approached, and he helped her up with ease as he passed. She quickly skipped a few paces ahead of him and continued on with her march.

After a few miles of cheerful marching, skipping, and rambling at length about the most unimportant of subjects, Anna's vigor from her run and subsequent encounter had faded, giving in at last to the bitterness of the cold, and spreading itself to her mood. Her feet dragged and her head hung low against the cold and the wind. Marshall kept pace behind her, face almost impassive, but also vigilant, scanning their surroundings as they went. He noticed her sluggish movements. "Giving up yet?"

"No," she grumbled defiantly. "There's still plenty of ground to cover, so there's still plenty more to do." She did a double take as she noticed something up ahead on the right-hand side of the road. "Car!"

She sprinted towards the snow buried vehicle as Marshall watched, "A dead CTV. When was the last time we found one of those that still worked?"

She reached the vehicle and began brushing snow off of it, making her way to the front, "Hopefully today! Or rather—wait..." she frowned as she searched for the right words, and then shrugged, "whatever! Besides, there's no harm in checking." The doors by the driver's and right passenger seats were open and the seats themselves were covered in snow, but there were no keys in the ignition. A quick search around the cabin did not yield them, only a few lost and unwanted objects remained in the car, like lint, stray paper clips and used staples, along with a curious, dark stain in the back seat. Undeterred, Anna began to search more thoroughly.

Marshall stepped forward to watch her, but stopped and stared at the car, his brows furrowing, "This is a Cruisemaster, isn't it?"

"I...guess so?" Anna replied from inside the vehicle. "I never really got into cars or anything, so I'm not sure. As long as it could get from A to B and could go fast, I didn't really care about anything else." She poked her head out. "Why? Is there something special about the Cruisemaster?"

"Yes," he said without turning, and lightly brushed a hand along the hood, "they were the only Civilian Transport Vehicle model that was used by the staff at Arendelle manor..."

Anna's eyes widened as she took in what that implied, "so that means...this is Kristoff's car?"

"It's entirely likely."

She laughed triumphantly and punched at the air with a loud whoop before hopping around to point at Marshall, a giddy smile plastered on her freckled face, "and _you _said we weren't going to stumble upon anything!"

"I said we weren't going to stumble upon _him, _not-"

"Hey!" A third voice boomed, echoing off of the landscape. Anna froze, and Marshall drew his gun, searching for the source. He didn't have to wait long, as someone burst out through the trees up the hill from the opposite side of the road. He was clad in knit clothing with a coat, a bulletproof vest, winter boots, wool trousers, and a gray cap which he wore on his head. A long, sharp, and clean hunting knife hung from a belt at his waist, and he carried a powerful-looking rifle in both hands. He slid down the white slope and pointed it at Marshall before approaching slowly.

"Put the gun down!" he yelled, and Marshall ceded, dropping his handgun in the snow, and raising his hands above his head. Anna did the same.

"Now turn around..." the man commanded sternly and slowly. His grip was steady, and he did not tremble with fear or anxiety. He was focused, and gave off the air that he knew exactly how to use his firearm. "...and walk away. Now."

Anna's hands came down into more a placatory gesture, "Look, we don't mean any trouble-"

Marshall hissed at her, "Anna..."

"If you aren't looking for it, then do as I say!" The man's finger twitched, and he suddenly looked absolutely furious.

"We're looking for someone-"

"A likely story on top of a fucking mountain."

"Someone who doesn't like being around people."

The man was silent. His throat bobbed as he swallowed. No one said anything, or even moved, for a long time.

Anna glanced around before breaking the silence, "So...have you seen anyone?"

"Get out of here before I shoot you."

"What?"

"_Get out!_"

"Anna, let's go, he's not dicking around." Marshall was still eyeing the man and his rifle.

Anna groaned and whined, "But we've come so far!"

The man was approaching again, and Marshall stepped between him and Anna, "We'll leave, just please put your gun down."

"I'm the one giving the orders here, you wanderer."

Anna's eyes lit up, "wait, does that mean you live around here?"

The man's eyes widened and his composure loosened again. Teeth gritted from behind closed, pursed lips. Anna frowned suddenly, eyes squinting slightly; something about his face seemed oddly familiar.

Marshall grabbed the rifle barrel with his left hand and and lurched it to the right. The man fired in surprise as he was pulled forward before receiving a right hook in the nose that sent him tumbling. Marshall flipped the gun around and aimed it, staring coldly down the sights at the recovering stranger, who was now on his hands and knees, spitting out blood. The tables were turned. "I don't take kindly to people threatening my charge."

The man laughed cynically, and slowly stood up into a crouch, wiping his bloody nose, "Your charge? What's the point in protecting someone other than yourself in this dead, frozen world? A sense of duty? Love? Self interest?"

Without warning he sidestepped, the sudden motion causing Marshall to fire at where the man had been. The other man drew his knife and slashed, but the large bodyguard leapt back with a surprising amount of agility. He backed Anna away in time to catch the man's arm as he swung again. He dropped the knife and used the free moment his opponent spared to glance at it to pull him down with his captured arm, roll over his shoulder, and secure him into a chokehold. Marshall dropped the rifle as both of his hands went to try and pry the man's arms off of his neck. A quick knee to the lower spine from the stranger sent the bodyguard down to his knees in the snow, and he coughed harshly.

"Stop! Stop it, both of you!" Anna grabbed the attacker by the back of his coat with both hands and literally flung him off of Marshall with much more force than seemed possible for her size. He landed on his back in the snow yards away with a grunt, bounced, and rolled a considerable distance.

He sat up again, "how on earth did you..." he trailed off as he stared at her, with her flushed cheeks, thin pouting lips, and brilliant orange hair styled in braided pigtails, with a curious streak of white as brilliant as the powdery, wintry ground around them, and everything fell into place.

"Anna?"

He had hardly recognized her, but it was hard to unsee it now that he had realized. She was a few years older now, and her face had a much more angular and sallow look to it with more pronounced cheekbones and freckles, likely resulting from both an increase in maturity and from living meal-to-meal. He noticed a scar running across her cheek and up to her ear as well as other nicks, blemishes, and callouses that were inevitable after years of hard living. While her teal eyes were still as bright and lively as he remembered, they were not the eyes he once knew. They had lost something, something that he then realized was missing from every part of her.

"What happened to you?" He whispered, half to himself.

"The world's changed, and I'm just trying to keep up," Anna said as she strode over to him. He stood up, and she didn't even flinch, didn't even break eye contact. She stared intently at him, trying to look beyond the dirty blonde beard and the dirt and grime. She saw the large nose, the strong jaw, the brown eyes under thick, dark brows, with a small and light smattering of freckles, and an abstract wall from behind which his surprise and pity were leaking.

"Kristoff...Holy shit. Holy _shit!_" she whipped around at Marshall, who was still trying to stand, and jabbed a finger at him, "you are not allowed to doubt me anymore!" She noticed a movement out of the corner of her eye, and whipped around to see Kristoff walking away with a retrieved rifle and knife. "Hey!"

"It would be best if you forgot you ever saw me."

She scoffed and started trying to jog after him through the snow and up the incline, "Like hell that's going to happen! Do you have _any_ idea how long I've been looking for you?" She gestured to Marshall, "how long _we've_ been looking for you?"

He turned, "Why would you be looking for me?"

"I need you to help me find Elsa."

"And what makes you I think I would know where she is?"

"Wha- You were her _bodyguard_, and you-"

"It wouldn't matter even if we knew where she was," he spat cynically.

"What do you mean? That's how we'd _find _her!"

"It doesn't matter because she's _dead_, Anna!" She had struck a nerve, and he was yelling now. Anna seemed to be going through denial, but her face hardened quickly after the vulnerable moment. She spoke quietly. "Did you see her die? Did you even see her body?"

"No."

She shook her head. "Then you don't know." Her voice cracked, and she sounded like she was on the verge of tears. "You don't tell me my sister is _dead_ if you don't even _know!_" Her cries echoed off of the ice of the mountain and the timber of the trees, fading off and leaving an air of command, like that of a monarch, of a queen. Her breath was shaky. "Look, if you're not looking for her—if you've _given up_ on her, then at least tell me what you know. You do that, and you'll never have to see my damned face again. If not, everyone in these wastes is going to know about you and whatever little stockpile or whatever it is that you're so damn keen on protecting! Is that clear?!"

He turned away from her, and continued his walk. "You're such a spitfire, and that's the last thing I need." He walked off into the trees and out of sight.

Anna was left staring after him, dumbfounded. "Did he seriously just..."

"Does this mean we're going to tell everybody?" Marshall asked, "because the last time I checked, the only other person around here that we know who's still alive is Olaf." Anna took off after Kristoff's tracks and Marshall scoffed, "are you serious?"

"He obviously knows something! And I'm going to find out what it is even if it kills me!"

"I do not approve of this plan," Marshall grumbled as he trudged along after her.

"And I could frankly care less. Now c'mon, you big lug."

— —

The wooden door to the cabin opened roughly as the heavily clothed man entered through it. He placed his rifle next to the frame, and slid back the chain that prevented the door from opening more than a small crack before taking off his hat. The interior of the cabin itself was free of dust, and once again worn from heavy use. Ration cans littered the floor, and a cooking pot hung in the fireplace. The lights were also flickering; he needed to clean the snow off of the solar panels on the roof. In fact, he had needed to do it for a while now; the backup power in the cells could last for weeks before they began to sputter or fail.

He sighed and flopped down onto the sofa, procrastinating further. After a moment spent staring at the wood-paneled ceiling, he reached down and padded around for his lute, before strumming it once, and singing.

"_Reindeers are better than people._

_Indeed, I know this to be true,_

_for people will beat you and curse you and cheat you._

_Everyone of them's bad, except a few._

"_But people smell better than reindeers,_

_yet it still doesn't make things right._

_For the evil in man is deceptively true,_

_in the hearts and the eyes they oppose._

He trailed off sadly, rolling through thoughts as cynical as his lyrics, and began to nod off. Right before he slipped into the unconscious comfort of sleep, a five-step knock sounded at the door, and jarred him awake. Kristoff would have normally said nothing to the intruder, and hoped that they would simply go away, but he knew that knock, and that its owner wouldn't be deterred so easily. He still waited for a moment, just in case, but as expected, the knock was repeated, and much more violently.

He turned over on the couch, "Go away."

"Not until you tell me what you know about my sister!"

"There's nothing worth telling. Now, are you going to go down there and tell everyone like you said, or were you just bluffing?"

"Oh, I _will_ tell them, but I just decided to give you another chance first because I'm so," she kicked the door. "Damn," another kick. "Nice!" The third kick left a crack in the door, and he heard her exclaim and mutter in pain as she hopped around on the porch. Seeing that the wooden entrance wasn't going to hold up against her frenzied onslaught, Kristoff rose from the couch with a heavy sigh, and went over to the door, picking up his rifle from where he had left it. He unlocked the deadbolt but left the chain—a good decision, as Anna attempted to barge in the moment she heard the click of the lock, thrusting the door open as far as it would go before stopping abruptly with a loud slam.

Teal eyes and freckles glared out through the thin crack in between the door and its frame, and looked down to see the barrel of his rifle pointed at her abdomen. They flicked back up without any sense of apprehension visible in them. "If you aren't actually planning to shoot me, you shouldn't be pointing that thing around."

"What makes you so sure that I'm not?"

"If you had planned to kill me, you would have done it back there on the road. Either that or you're so bad at murdering people that you're still trying."

Kristoff exhaled sharply in amusement at her words, so oddly similar to the ones he had once heard from another. He pulled the gun away and placed the butt of it on the ground as he gripped the barrel, holding it like a staff. "Fine, but I'm still not letting you in, feistypants."

"Do you really think you can stop me?"

"If you trespass, I will consider you a threat, and then I _will_ shoot you, regardless of the past."

She growled in frustration, "Just let me in! Don't shut me out like this!" her fists slammed into the door and stayed there as she leaned her head against it. "I've had enough of that already. I don't care if you think it's pointless, but I _need _to know what happened to her!"

Kristoff said nothing, and thought for a long moment; If he went along with her demands, which would only cost him all the peace and quiet he had worked so hard to maintain, she would probably go away. If he didn't, the only other way to get her to stop would be to kill her. Despite how cold-hearted he had sounded before, the thought of taking Anna's life did not actually sit well with him in the slightest. It wasn't the notion of killing itself that had deterred him—he had taken enough lives during his military career to become desensitized to the idea—it was the thought of extinguishing the flame of hope that resided within her, and that had lit up the world for her sister, and for a time, himself as well, that did. He let out another heavy sigh and closed the door to unlatch the chain.

"Hey!" Anna pounded on the wooden planks, "don't you dare-" she was suddenly pitching forward, falling into the cabin, but was stopped from hitting the floor by two pairs of arms as both Marshall and Kristoff managed to catch her. "Sorry," Anna said with a sheepish laugh.

"Just get in here, both of you."

— —

The fire burned in the grate of the cabin's modest hearth, and Anna sat by it on the small sofa with Marshall, legs clutched about her knees, staring into the flames, lost in thoughts about Elsa, Kristoff, the ice, the past, and the journal. Kristoff stood by the couch, his arms folded over his chest. "What do you want to know?" he asked without preamble.

"About Elsa? Everything. Tell me everything- well actually, no, not everything. Start at...um..." she turned to Marshall, "how far did we get into his diary?"

The large man's brows furrowed, but right before he could say anything, Kristoff interjected. "Wait, you've been reading my journal?"

Anna whipped back around, "Oh! Um, yes, yes we have. Sorry, but it was all we had to go on." She smiled a little to herself, and her eyes wandered back to the fire, "I definitely learned a lot..."

"How far did you get?" he snapped.

She looked up to see that his face was turning red—not with anger, but with embarrassment.

She looked back down, also beginning to blush, "Up to when you brought her to the cabin," she looked around, "This cabin, I suppose."

Kristoff sighed, and covered his face with a hand, before using it to scratch at his beard, "Well then. That's pretty far."

"Yeah, we're almost done with it, and Olaf might have actually finished it by now."

Kristoff groaned, not pleased that the journal was still in some else's hands. "I want that back."

"Right, sorry...though I told you that you wouldn't ever have to see my face again if you told me everything so I'm not sure if I'd be able to return it without um-"

"Enough of that. You're already here, so we might as well get this over with."

"Okay..." Anna spared a glance at Marshall and his cut lip before looking back at Kristoff. "Do you have any band-aids?"

"Yes." He left to go rummage through the first aid kit, and returned shortly after with an appropriately-sized bandage, which he handed to Anna. She scooted over to Marshall and opened it before giving it an odd look.

"Reindeer?"

Kristoff seemed slightly embarrassed again, "It's all I have. I thought you knew that already."

"No, I didn't. It's adorable though." She smiled at it.

"Oh."

_I suppose that's a good thing, _Kristoff thought to himself._ Her not knowing about it I mean, not the...other part...Wait, why I am I making up excuses in my own thoughts?_

Marshall gently pushed Anna's hand away when she tried to put the bandage on his face, and she reluctantly put it back down. She then leaned towards Kristoff and continued speaking, "so...what happened after the cabin?"

Kristoff's eyebrows raised as he exhaled with a clap, "A lot. I'm going to go get a chair."

Upon his return, he sat down, cleared his throat, and began.


	6. Mental Synchronization

**A/N:** I composed a track meant to reflect the themes and tones that I associate with Winter's Guardian. I suppose that makes it a literal theme song.  /the-vertigo-master/let-it-go-winters-guardian-mix I also have some other stuff up there and on Bandcamp (same name as on here) if you're into EDM.

— —

**Chapter VI: Mental Synchronization**

It was the night after we had returned from the cabin. Elsa sat at her desk in the darkness of her study, wearing her nightclothes—a simple pale blue camisole with flannel pants that were darker, but of the same hue—and working away at the large, thin trio of monitors that had risen from a compartment at the edge of her desk. Her fingers flew across the touch-sensitive surface of her keyboard, pattering rapidly and softly like droplets of rain against an umbrella, as the pale blue light of the screens shone brightly on her hands and face, lighting up her equally pale skin and hair, the latter of which was left down, free to cascade in thick locks over her bare shoulders and down her back. Her bangs were swept back out of her face, though one rebellious tendril in the front strived to reach the ground, held back and tied down by obligation and duty from its star-crossed lover below.

She hardly blinked as she worked, but when she did, the movement of her lashed eyelids was heavy and slow. She would occasionally completely forget to open them before moments later jarring back to awareness, and continuing on as if the lapse had never occurred.

"You seem tired," I commented.

"Hmm."

"Perhaps you should rest." I checked my watch, which listed the time as 2:13 AM. "It's getting late."

"So it is," she conceded. I waited for her to finish up the last bit she was working on and stand, but she never did. I let it drag on for about another minute before inquiring of it.

"Ma'am?"

"I will turn in shortly. You may go on ahead."

"Very well then."

It wasn't technically an order, and I had no inclination to believe that she would actually follow, so I decided not to leave. At least a full five minutes had passed before she even noticed. Her eyes narrowed as she looked up at me with an irritated glare. "Did I not just dismiss you?"

"You implied that I had a choice, so I elected to stay."

"Oh, well, allow me to rephrase that then. _Go away._"

"As you wish." I turned on a heel and proceeded to follow the order, concealing my slight disappointment flawlessly. Though there were no longer any formalities dictating that I hide such things in private company, getting Elsa unnecessarily riled up would hardly help calm her already-frayed nerves.

— —

I was not surprised by what I saw the next morning, though I was nonetheless disappointed. Elsa had taken the liberty of having breakfast in the manor's main dining hall, a large and high-ceilinged room with a massive table of polished and varnished wood stained a dark brown and surrounded by about 20 chairs of the same color and quality; the exact number of them was unknown to me, as I had never bothered to count, or even cared enough to. Elsa always came early to avoid running into Anna; she was as consistently late to rise as Elsa was to wake at the crack of dawn. Upon her arrival, which was ironically later than usual, I groaned internally. She was wearing shades again. Indoors. She did not acknowledge anyone as she entered, which was normal, but it seemed to have more to do with her being incredibly preoccupied than with being aloof. Her bangs shaded her brows while the rest of her gold-white hair was pulled back into its usual bun. She was wearing a semi-fitted black suit today with a purple blouse, somewhat unusual for her, as she generally always wore very light colors. She went about and looked around at everything besides her staff as if there was something subtly surreal about the space, finding oddities in the swirls of wood, and something mystical in the rays of morning light that came in through the tall, paned windows along the wall.

She sat down at the seat halfway along the length of the immense table, directly across from me. Her breakfast was placed before her, an omelette, topped with seasonings and shredded parmesan and that appeared to contain tomatoes, onions, and some other variety of cheese. The meal also included two sausage patties, a biscuit, and a steaming mug of something I couldn't see. Upon noticing it, Elsa immediately drank from the cup, and I could only assume that it was coffee. She frowned at it afterwards, likely disappointed by its taste; she had in the past always insisted that I obtain her coffee from the same corner coffeehouse, a small mom-and-pop sort of affair called Oaken's, though it would be more accurate to call it a pop-and-pop, as the owner—unsurprisingly named Oaken—ran the shop with his husband.

Elsa lightly placed the cup back down on its ornate coaster of engraved cork and metal, and her impassive lenses looked up in my direction. Her frown deepened.

"You're staring."

"I'm observing."

"Hmm." She picked up her silver, modern fork and knife, and began to cut into her omelette, feigning indifference so well that I would likely be the only one to notice the truth.

Another staff member placed my own meal before me, toast with jam along with scrambled eggs and bacon. After hearing the heavy closing of a door echo back to me, I glanced around at the room to find that all the servers and dining staff had all left. Such a thing would seem odd and unbecoming in most households when their employer and mistress was still seated at the table, but most mistresses were not nearly as outwardly callous or dismissive of their servants as Elsa was. After eventually coming to understand that she did not usually require or desire their presence, they had learned to stay out of her way. Now they would simply place her food before her, and only returned to the dining hall once she had left in order to collect her dishes and cutlery. They knew that if she required anything, she would just ask me. As a result of all that, Elsa and I were often alone in this room, and could generally speak privately.

"Did you sleep well?" I asked in a tone meant to show that I knew full well that she did not.

Though it was hard to say for sure with the aviators blocking her eyes, I could tell by the set of her lips that she recognized it.

"Must we always make small talk when we're alone?" She was avoiding the subject, but there isn't much of anywhere to hide from the watchful eyes of a hawk when you're stranded on a plain. Her behavior was very predictable, but seemed oddly childish.

I shrugged subtly, "I suppose not, though I feel there is a matter we should discuss."

She sighed, and cut to the chase. "Why are you so stingy about my sleeping habits?"

"To be honest, I am more concerned with your habit of _not_ sleeping; it's hardly healthy and is worsening your stress."

She popped a forkful of egg into her mouth, chewed thoroughly, and swallowed, "It's not that big of a deal."

"The bags under your eyes beg to differ. They're so dark that you're wearing shades to hide them. If that's not an obvious enough sign, then nothing is."

"You're absolutely right." she raised her utensils again, "Nothing is, because nothing's _wrong_." The knife clanged loudly against the porcelain plate as it cut clean through the omelette. A pale texture began to form with a crackle where her fingers touched the metal.

"Elsa."

"I'm not going to put anything off," another forkful, "I have too much to do to prepare for the merger and other affairs."

"Tasks that I'm sure can be easily delegated to other employees."

"I'm afraid not." She dabbed at her mouth with her napkin. "Mistakes cannot be tolerated, and those that are caused by others can be easily avoided if I complete their tasks myself."

"You know, you're even more prone to messing up when you keep working yourself to death." I cocked my head to the side, mouth pursed and squinting slightly as I suddenly noticed something peculiar about her. "In fact..."

The sausage on her fork was raised halfway to her mouth when she stopped abruptly, "What?"

"Your shades are upside-down."

The fork hand tensed, and the other placed down her knife before reaching for the bridge of her nose to find that the silver aviators were indeed upside-down. She took them off quickly, and I managed to see the extent of the dark marks and the redness of her eyes before she placed the shades back on correctly, blushing furiously.

"They actually don't look that bad. You might not need those today."

"I can't afford for them to be seen at all. It sends a bad message."

"To be frank, Ms. Elsa, wearing them makes you look like you have a hangover, which I believe would send an even worse message than the evidence a sleepless night."

"Seriously?" She seemed genuinely surprised.

I frowned, subsequently puzzled by her reaction. "Yes. You're wearing shades at inappropriate times, drinking coffee, and look generally miserable. To the casual observer, a hangover would likely be the first assumption to cross their mind, and judging by how often you've worn those shades in the past, their second one would probably be that you're an alcoholic."

"Oh. I wasn't aware...though that does explain why almost all the gifts I've been receiving lately have been wine or liquor of some kind..."

I rubbed my eyes in exasperation, "did you seriously not realize this before?"

She removed her shades, and blinked back the influx of light that began to assault her eyes. "No. I've never had one before. I hate the taste of wine; it's too bitter." She folded the sunglasses and placed them down on the table before looking up at me with ringed, uncertain eyes. It was another rare moment of vulnerability. "Are you sure it looks alright?" she asked worriedly.

I smirked, "If they ever managed to get past the deep, wintry blue of your eyes, they might notice a little." I frowned to myself as I realized what exactly I had just said. Elsa's lightly freckled cheeks flushed, and she quickly finished her breakfast. Afterwards, she collected her shades and stood.

"We should leave. I don't want to run into Anna."

I disapproved of her haste, but I did not express it. "Yes, ma'am."

— —

Two hours later, I found myself standing against the wall besides the door to Elsa's office, with Mr. Syd leaned up on the other side of it. I scanned the empty hallway, taking in its light gray tiles, its pale walls with decorative and minimalist beige padding and small simplistic pillars of reddish-brown wood spaced evenly along, and the long fluorescent lights that seemed to blend in seamlessly with the ceiling's contrastively dark surface. On the far wall, windows stretching almost from the floor to the ceiling allowed in a reasonable amount of light, the auto shades built into the glass preventing the full intensity of the blinding rays from entering. Nothing seemed amiss or out-of-place.

I heard an odd metallic click, and looked towards the sound of it to find Mr. Syd holding a lighter, and using it to ignite the cigarette sticking out of his mouth.

I frowned in disapproval. "You do realize that you can't smoke in this building, or anywhere else really, don't you?"

He shrugged and snapped the lighter closed as he inhaled the gaseous poison. A hand gripped the small roll and removed it as he exhaled, the cloud billowing out like condensed vapor, only darker, and much deadlier. He smiled wistfully. "We all do dumb things when we're young, things we come to regret."

"You still _are_ young."

He shrugged again, and I noticed tension in his jaw, a flash of anger visible through the crack I had made in his mask. Hans took another drag, and placed his hands in his pockets. "I can understand why you despise me, Bjorgman. As I'm sure you know, my _family_," he said the word with such venom that he practically spat it, "owns South Isles Corp, the company that is merging with Frost." He took yet another pull on the cigarette. "My reputation also precedes me. Surveillance and covert operations aremy specialty, and I have been told that I am deceptive and manipulative."

"If you're trying to gain my sympathy, you might as well just stop talking."

He smiled, "I wouldn't dream of doing something so futile. All I'm saying is that I harbor neither you nor Ms. Arendelle any ill will. I'll admit that I have my own motives, but doesn't every man? We all have our reasons for the things that we do, regardless of what others may believe or think."

"Your words don't mean anything to me. Only a naïve fool would bother to trust you. Save your breath."

That damned smile of his returned. "Perhaps. I merely said it because I wanted to. Whether or not you believe the truth is insignificant; it doesn't change what it is."

The similarity between his words and those that I had shared with Elsa at the cabin struck me as odd, and a strain of paranoia began to creep in, leading me to fear that he had perhaps found us up on the mountain. Then again, it also wasn't unlikely that he had come up with the words on his own—a simple coincidence, and considering his personality and demeanor, one that wasn't unlikely.

Mr. Syd glanced back at me, and changed the subject. "How do you think the boss is going to handle the merger? From what I remember of my research, she only inherited the company a few years ago after her parents had passed in that plane crash. I know the Arendelle family line has always liked to stick to its old traditions, but placing an inexperienced young woman at the helm of a multi-billion dollar company hardly seems logical, even if she is their eldest daughter." He took a final pull on the cigarette before pulling out a small, silver case from his pocket with a gloved hand. When he opened it and dropped the crumpled and burnt stick inside, I saw that it was a portable ashtray. He closed it with a snap and returned it to his pocket, and his expression suddenly darkened. "You know, she never came back to see me after I tried to tell her about my findings." I secretly grinned at that; his suffering and misery never ceased to please me. He continued, wearing the most cocky and condescending expression I had ever seen, "it seems she doesn't care nearly as much as you so defensively claim."

My hidden smile flipped in an instant. "She didn't say anything to you because I had told her after you parted ways with us to retreat to your little cave. Don't mistake your arrogant sense of self-importance for her incompetence. You're just a bodyguard who hides in the shadows, and a rookie on top of it all."

Either Syd's façade wasn't nearly as strong as I had believed it to be, or I was pushing all the right buttons. His skin flushed, his hands clenched, and the last vestiges of tobacco smoke blasted from his nostrils in a huff. He looked away, and seemed to be trying his best to pretend I wasn't there. It was the only thing he could do, as we were not permitted to leave our posts, and he knew I wouldn't hesitate to inform Elsa if he were to try skipping out.

The door opened just then, and Elsa came out, with her tired and shadeless eyes, carrying her black jacket under her arm. After looking between Syd and I, and noticing how he was turned away like a petulant child, her default, cold gaze dropped into a frown, and she looked up at me. After a moment, I realized that she was giving me a look, one which meant to communicate a lot more than seemed apparent.

_Don't antagonize the enemy. We'll discuss it later,_ she said—or rather, she didn't say. I was surprised that I was able to understand it; such communication was usually only shared between couples and longtime friends—a relationship level which I hadn't thought we'd reached yet. Or ever. She turned and proceeded down the hall, heels clicking as Syd and I fell into step behind and beside her.

I had assumed that she was heading home from the office early, and was surprised when she instead hit the down button on the elevator. If she was going to talk to someone else in the building, she would have likely just called them to save herself time and needless face-to-face interaction, meaning that she was likely heading to the ground floor and somewhere else in the sprawling metropolis. In all the time that I've been in her service, Elsa Arendelle has never walked the streets of the city, always preferring to fly in via the helipad. Whether or not it stemmed from an aversion to the common folk, or to just folk in general, I did not know. I would have asked her right then if it weren't for Syd, but as he was there, I was forced to remain silent. Something in my expression must have given me away, as Elsa had glanced over at me expectantly for a moment, but turned back upon realizing her mistake. Her red lips twitched faintly with displeasure.

The elevator dinged, and the reflective, metal doors slid open to reveal the lobby, an impressively large entry space that reflected the company's immensity and prestige quite well, all full of shiny shades of gray tile and metal with sudden patches of rufescent wood panelling placed strategically in an aesthetic manner. Elsa stalked into the clean and professional space, heading straight for the large, revolving glass doors across from it that led to the outside world. The entire side of the lobby that faced the street was made of glass as well, and I could see the name of the company written in massive, crisp, sans-serif lettering on the outside, appearing backwards and revealing the beams of metal supporting it up from where I stood. As we neared the exit, Elsa squared her shoulders, as if preparing to step into a room full of poison gas, a tribunal, or some other kind of unpleasantry. We wound our way through the revolving door, and entered an entirely different world.

The streets were packed like any other major city, and a cacophony of sounds, sights, and smells assaulted our senses. Syd and I were relatively unaffected, but Elsa practically gasped aloud in shock before quickly schooling her features back into indifference, and setting off to the left. I took point, clearing the way ahead as Syd held up the rear, our combined efforts creating a decent berth around our charge.

She glanced around at us, and frowned at me. "What are you doing?"

"Basic procedure, ma'am."

"You don't know where you're going."

She pinched the fabric of my suit jacket on the upper arm, dragging me to the right and towards the crosswalk before marching out ahead of me. I sighed at her stubbornness, and did my best to keep pace with her.

A couple blocks later, we found ourselves in front of a modest coffeehouse. A wooden sign hanging from above the door read "Oaken's Trading Post", and a smaller one hung below it as an afterthought with the words "and Sauna".

I recognized the building, and looked down at Elsa with a somewhat disappointed gaze. "Had you of told me that this was our destination, I would have been able to maintain my position in front."

She didn't even spare me a glance as she walked inside. "It doesn't matter now. We're here."

The interior was just as humble as the outside of the establishment, small and cozy with a rustic feel that reminded me of my cabin. Almost every aspect of the room was constructed out of wood, with the exceptions being the hearth embedded in the left wall, composed of stone and mortar. The windows were of course made of reinforced safety glass, like all urban shopfronts. About a dozen tables were arranged around the room, each with their own accompaniment of chairs. The only light in the space came from the large fireplace and the comparatively dim lanterns on the tables and the walls that supplemented it.

"Hoo-hoo!"

Elsa and Syd's heads whipped around, startled, towards the back of the room, where an extremely large man sat behind a long counter, directly opposite from the front doors. He was smiling broadly with his hands folded before him, projecting a gentle and unobtrusive air around himself. Unlike the rest of my party, I had been here several times before, and was no longer startled by the quiet, jolly giant's unique ability to escape notice.

He beamed, "Welcome to Oaken's! I can take your order, ya?"

Elsa gave him a small, polite smile, and headed towards a table near the far corner of the room. Syd and I began to follow, but she turned back and glared at Syd, who suddenly began to resemble Sven.

"What are you doing? Go order lunch."

Syd appeared confused and slightly bewildered. "Um...What should I order?"

Her gaze became incredulous. "The usual?"

"Which is?"

The blonde exhaled in exasperation, and began to stalk off toward the counter. "Come on," she grumbled. She almost grabbed his shoulder, but retracted her hand prematurely as if it had been scalded, and continued on with Syd following her without contact.

I stayed at the table, and scanned the space around me. Oaken still sat behind the counter, now speaking with Elsa, and through the porthole in the door leading into what was presumably the sauna, I caught a glimpse through the steam of the owner's husband, whose name I did not know. He saw me as well, and waved while seeming to mouth Oaken's odd, trademark greeting. I gave him a polite nod and looked elsewhere. The rest of the tables were empty, which wasn't surprising; tourists were generally the only customers who actually came in to eat here. Everyone else simply ordered from elsewhere, online, or otherwise, and had their meal or drink delivered. The entire storefront itself was probably only here for those occasional tourists, and also perhaps for actually making the city aware of the business's existence.

I didn't really expect to find anything suspicious during my scan; performing it was honestly more of a habit now than anything. Nothing had ever seemed out-of-place during any of my previous visits to the small coffeehouse, all of which were necessary treks taken when the delivery service was unavailable for some reason or other.

Oaken's voice cut through my thoughts with sudden coherence. "Just a moment, your order will be ready shortly. That will be 1470 creds, ya?"

I looked over in time to see a still somewhat puzzled Hans next to an Elsa who was becoming steadily more irritated by it. She nodded towards the large man, and presented her chipped wrist for the register to scan. Hans whispered something to her, and after she nodded, quickly crossed the room and went down a hallway to the right of the sauna entrance. After completing her transaction, Elsa turned and walked back to our table, her heels clicking on the stone floor.

She sat down and placed her hands over one another on the surface of the smoothed wooden table, and followed my gaze when it flipped back to the hallway. "Mr. Syd is using the restroom," she explained.

"Seems more likely that he just wanted some privacy for his breakdown."

Elsa's brows furrowed, and her face took on a curious expression that squinted her eyes and almost admitted the ghost of a confused smile to her scarlet lips.

I continued, "Have you noticed how flustered he's been since we came in here? Right after you started antagonizing him he got all up in a fuss-"

She almost let out a single laugh at the expression, "up in a fuss?"

I waved her off, "Whatever, you know what I mean. Basically, he started getting uncomfortable the moment the situation was out of the predictable realm he thought he could control. I don't think that man has ever done any actual field work in his life."

"Perhaps," Elsa's gaze absently wandered back to the hall as it followed her thoughts. She smiled wanly, "I'm almost starting to miss Sven. He was incompetent as well, but he wasn't this bad."

I frowned, and my gaze drifted to somewhere far beyond the world around me. The memory of him always returned me to the glassy dead stare that he was now frozen with for eternity. While I had been almost as frustrated by his mistakes as Elsa was, I had to admit that I did actually care about him to some degree. The wave of melancholy crested over my loosened mask, and pulled Elsa down under its waves to drown her along with me.

"Do you know where he is?" I asked her.

She nodded, "somewhere where he won't be found, unless we want to find him."

"I wasn't aware you had such a place."

She smiled tightly.

"Would it perhaps be related to the place you spoke of in the cabin?"

"I'm not going to reveal that secret until you decide to unwrap a few of yours. Trust is a two-way street."

The lunch order arrived just then, carried by a young and familiar-looking short, pale man with overly large front teeth and wild, yet close-cropped, hair. His large, dark eyes lit up when he saw me. "Oh heya, Sven!"

Elsa jumped slightly at the noise, and I sighed, "It's Kristoff. Sven is- Sven was the other bodyguard."

"Oh right, right...wait—what do you mean _was?_" Olaf looked back and forth between us in confusion.

Another heavy sigh. Elsa turned to him, "Sven is...no longer with us."

"Oh ok, so I guess he just moved on to bigger and better things then," he nodded sagely. "No offense to you, of course, Ms. Arendelle," he added quickly.

We were too tired of being morose to correct the blissfully ignorant and blatantly innocent fellow, so Elsa simply nodded, while I said nothing.

The waiter suddenly remembered the entire reason why he was over here, and his entire countenance flipped around to his usual, strangely jolly demeanor. "Ah yes, and these lovely morsels here would be for you!" He set down a tall cup of coffee before Elsa along with a plate containing a sizeable slice of chocolate fudge cake. That was literally all that she ordered. For lunch. A basic and much more appropriate sandwich was laid before me, but I did not inspect it, as I was too preoccupied trying to figure out why the hell Elsa had elected to skip her meal all together and move straight to the dessert.

After the still-smiling Olaf left, I broached the brewing subject. "Are you planning to eat actual food this afternoon?"

She shot me a glare as she separated a portion of the soft, spongy cake from the rest of its sweet brethren with her fork, "You have way too many things on your absurdly long worry list to bother with fussing over my diet on top of everything else."

"Diet plays a massive role in your health, and as your bodyguard, I am tasked with ensuring your-"

"Oh for god's sake, would you stop saying that all the time? You're starting to sound like a robot. Hell, you already act like one half the time anyway."

I shrugged, "You're paying me to do a job, so I'm doing it. Though I never imagined I'd have to convince a grown woman to eat her vegetables, or at least something other than pastries."

"First of all, cake is _not_ a pastry—and second, I _do_ eat other things, but right now, I wanted cake, so I got cake. I'm an adult and I'm rich; I can do what I want. Deal with it." She plopped the fork and its captured prize into her mouth and practically shivered with pleasure. When she came down from her little high and opened her eyes, her pale cheeks reddened in record time, and her features snapped back into a glare. "Stop judging me."

"I'm not judging you."

She pointed her fork at me, "Yes, you are. I can see it in your eyes."

I gave her the most impassive look that I could, and she continued to glare back at me. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Oaken watching us from the counter, chin resting on a hand, and with a dreamy smile on his face. I suddenly began to realize how the whole scene must have looked from the outside. I faked a cough into my hand and leaned away from Elsa—I hadn't even realized that we had moved so close together—and she seemed to have also just noticed what happened as well, and sat back into her chair as far as she could before wolfing down her cake with gusto and grace, somehow managing to balance the two like an acrobat of etiquette. Her eyes dared to glance back at mine, and for a moment, my vigilant gaze was entirely, and unquestionably captured, enraptured by rings of crystalline blue ice surrounded by a smooth plain of white snow.

Mr. Syd returned to the table just then, breaking what I can't describe as anything other than a trance. Brown and blue gazes scurried away inconspicuously, and Syd's own eyes of green glanced between us for a moment before peering down and realizing sourly that he was the only one without a plate. I smirked to myself and shamelessly bit into my sandwich, slowly chewing out of spite as he attempted to hide a vicious snarl.

Elsa finished her cake, and placed her fork down before folding her hands, straightening her back, donning her mask, and turning to Mr. Syd. "I have a task for you, and I trust that you will be able to complete it without being an incompetent fool."

He smoothly met her gaze and nodded, managing for once to maintain his cool. "I will not disappoint you."

"Very well then. With the merger with South Isles Corp approaching, I believe it is imperative that we gain as much intel on them as we can. As this is supposedly your specialty, I am entrusting the reconnaissance to you. Is that understood?"

Syd smiled, "Yes, and as it so happens, I already possess the intel that you speak of."

Elsa's brows furrowed, and ice crept into her voice. "And yet you did not inform me beforehand?"

"Well, as you had not asked-"

"Tell us what you have learned," she interrupted, leaning back again and folding her arms over her chest.

Mr. Syd cleared his throat, covering his irritation at being cut off, and began, "As the youngest of thirteen brothers, I was never regarded by my family, or their associates, with any degree of respect. It was partly because they were not obligated to, and partly because there were so many of us that we each received direct attention only sparingly. What most saw was merely a polished glimpse. I have seen my brothers as they truly are, seen the personas that emerged only when they did not need to hide themselves behind those trustworthy and angelic facades that our father had taught us to wield. I have seen their cruelty as they beat me over toys and books, tripped me in the hallways, and excluded me from practically everything. I saw their selfishness as they hogged what we were meant to share, forced to sleep countless nights in the parlor when they decided to use my room for whatever the hell they pleased. I saw their arrogance as they purposely neglected me, going so far at one point to actually pretend that I was invisible, literally, for two years. They learned deception and diplomacy from my father so well that they were able to use it against him and our mothers; not all of us were born from the same one. The eldest five were from our father's first marriage with his childhood sweetheart, the next four from her sister after the other had died, three more came from the third marriage, which was done entirely for the sake of the company, and lastly, I...was the bastard."

"A terribly sad story, but I fail to see how it is relevant."

With tension in his jaw, Syd continued, "South Isles Corp is—as I'm sure you already know—run by my family. My father stands at the helm as CEO, but the entire board is controlled by my brothers. Father is likely nothing more than their puppet at this point. As vicious as they all are though, they are not a pack of wolves, and given the chance, they will not hesitate to turn on each other. They will try their best to manipulate you during your meetings with them, and unless you can somehow keep them reigned in, they will turn all of your allies against you."

"Lucky for me, I don't have any." She sipped from her coffee, "do you have anything else?"

"No, ma'am."

"Good. I want all the details of your findings written up into a report and submitted to me _at check in_," she fixed a pointed stare at him, "not before."

"Yes, ma'am."

Elsa stood then, followed by both Syd and I, and left the shop. No one turned as Oaken waved us goodbye, and they likely did not notice him shiver from the cold draft that blew in through the door on that warm, summer afternoon.

— —

**A/N: **These chapters are getting longer every time, this one almost hit 6,000 words. Chapter 1 in contrast was about 4,000.


	7. Debugging

**Chapter VII: Debugging**

It was evening now, and I was once again alone with Elsa in her study. The desk's monitors were not raised this time, instead hidden below the wooden surface, and underneath slats with seemingly invisible seams. My charge was reading from her new tablet, and dressed in her pale blue nightclothes, a thin camisole with flannel pants that were of the same hue, only darker. Her hair was released from its tight bun, and the bangs were slicked back while the rest of the platinum-blonde locks once again hung down as a single long braid. She was also wearing glasses, squared-shaped lenses with black rims.

"Have you lost your contacts, Ma'am?"

"Elsa."

"Sorry."

She tucked back that one strand again, and flipped to the next page on her device. "I still have them, I just didn't feel like wearing them tonight while I read over these reports." She looked up from the bright screen of her tablet, the light reflecting off of her lenses, the frames, and the cerulean orbs that lay behind them. "They also keep frosting over," she admitted with a disappointed frown.

"You've had more trouble keeping control?"

She sighed, "It's just nerves. The merger's coming and I'm probably fine, but I just can't..." she put down the tablet and clutched her elbows with her freed hands. Her breath came out as mist, and she looked at me sharply, "I need a distraction."

"I thought you had already found one with all the extra work you've been doing."

"It's not helping."

I thought for a moment. "Is there anything you like to do?"

"What do you mean?"

"Like...hobbies. You seem to have plenty."

She stared down at the dark wood of the desk, "You do realize I don't actually enjoy doing any of those things, don't you?"

I shrugged slightly, and she sighed again, "I used to like sketching when I was younger, architecture and such. Father wasn't very supportive though, as I was to be the heir of Frost, and my mother of course sided with him, as always. I did have my way sometimes though." She looked up, "I actually designed the initial blueprints for our current headquarters."

"I...never knew that."

"I never told anyone." She watched as she began swirling a few snowflakes into a small cyclone on her desk. "Other than the planning crew and the construction supervisor, of course. I don't have any of my materials anymore though, and there wouldn't be much point in drafting something I won't ever build, so that's out."

An idea occurred to me as I watched her miniature blizzard, "Perhaps you could build something out of your ice. It could also be like stress relief in a way."

The little storm twitched. "I'm not sure if that would be the best idea."

"Just start small, and we can take it from there."

I caught a hint of her smile as it crossed her face before she dispelled the mini maelstrom, closed her eyes, and began to concentrate. "Alright then." She waved her hands out before her, manipulating the manifestation of her element into an arbitrary shape, transferring her intent from her mind to the world outside of it. The mass expanded upwards, and began to extrude, forming a humanoid shape. Details began to set as the swirls solidified into a pale blue, revealing a smiling face, and twin braids. Elsa's eyes opened slowly, but upon seeing her creation, and recognizing whom it was a likeness of, they widened to their limit in an instant. Her mouth gaped, grasping futility for words that would not come.

The sculpture was about 20 centimeters in height, capturing Anna twirling upon a pedestal, carefree and happy. It was beautifully crafted, accurate to memory from the smooth contours of the face, down to the eyelashes, dimples, and individual strands of hair.

The door handle turned with a clack, and then several things happened at once. Mr. Syd stepped in, glancing up as a panicked Elsa's arm swept across the desk, knocking the frozen masterpiece behind it, which I deftly caught mid-fall and placed back on top, and that Elsa tried and failed to block the view of before turning towards the door, all of which passed in about half a second.

Syd had stopped, somewhat ironically startled by the sudden flurry of activity, and Elsa, after fixing an accusatory glare at me, snapped back around towards the intruder and his leather-bound bundle of documents, pissed as hell.

"What are you doing? I said to send the report _at check in_! _Why_ is that so hard for you to understand?"

Syd frowned, and glanced over at the grandfather clock against one of the walls, "Ma'am, this _is_ check in; it's seven o'clock."

The cold burn within her vanished, giving way to embarrassment. "Oh." She recovered quickly and straightened in her chair. Syd came forward, eyeing the statue. Elsa outstretched an expectant hand toward him, obstructing his view, and snatched the bundled folder from him when he presented it to her. Elsa didn't like to transmit sensitive information through the network; her aversion to the threat of hackers was greater than her distaste for needless social interaction. She untied the strings on the case and laid out the E-paper contents on the desk before swiping a few onto her tablet.

"You should learn to knock," she stated without looking up.

Syd took a deep breath, "I saw on the cameras that you were alone," he looked over at me, "for the most part."

We both froze, and while the air conditioning unit had cut off, the room still became steadily colder. I noticed frost collecting by Elsa's feet.

"You placed cameras in my office." Her voice was as calm as the surface of a frozen lake—a thinly frozen body of deep water that Mr. Syd was stranded in the middle of.

"Yes," he looked up at a corner of the room, where a small, black, inconspicuous orb was latched onto the ceiling. We hadn't even bothered to check for such things; we didn't think we would have needed to in here of all places. "Just _a_ camera, to be specific," he looked back at Elsa, "You had said I was to guard from afar, which is very difficult to do without thorough surveillance."

Elsa wasn't standing for it, and counter-intuitively stood up, palms and arched fingertips on the desk. "You are officially on probation. You have infringed upon my privacy, which you have no right to do."

Syd looked offended, indignant, and began to complain like a petulant, spoiled child, "I was merely doing my job!"

"Debatable, and besides the point." She was furious, and the ice was spreading, even beginning to form on top of the desk as the air continued to freeze.

Syd's eyes glanced down for a fraction of a second, "Ms. Arendelle," he began tactfully, reaching a hand out as a diplomatic gesture, "if I may ease your-"

"No, you may not. Leave."

The hand clenched along with his teeth beneath white gloves and behind closed lips. "Yes Ma'am." He walked somberly to the door, yet attempted to preserve his dignity. Upon opening it, he took a step out and turned his toward Elsa, "A word of advice, and a warning: if South Isles catches wind of your little _tryst_," he gestured between Elsa and I with his fingers, "you're going to have a major scandal on your hands."

"Get out."

He closed the door without another word.

Elsa sank back into her chair, dropping her elbows onto the desk and her head into her hands before letting out a sound that started out as a groan and morphed into a growl of frustration.

I exhaled, "I'm honestly surprised that you didn't fire him on the spot; that's what you usually do."

"Believe me, I wanted to, but at the same time, that son of a bitch actually has a point." Her hands dropped onto the desk and clasped together, "Surveillance is necessary, to a certain degree." With a violent shifting of her hands, she cast a shard of ice that hurtled towards and shattered the small ceiling camera, its pieces clattering against the walls and the potted plant below. Only then did she sigh with relief, before frowning again and crossing her arms over her chest, "The question now is how much does he know, how much has he seen, and what he thinks it means. And on another note," she began grasping at her hands anxiously, and looked up at me, "Why the hell would he think that we're...intimate? The notion is completely absurd."

Ignoring the sudden stab of pain that her small statement left in my chest, I replied, "I think it's more obvious than either of us realize. Take what happened at Oaken's for example: from the outside, we did appear suspiciously like a couple, enough so to be problematic, according to Syd. Even in these progressive times, this could easily be blown out of proportion by the media, and ultimately force you to resign."

I couldn't help but wonder what it would be like if Syd suspicions about our...relationship were true. The fact that I didn't find the idea abhorrent or immoral in any way disturbed me.

Elsa bit her lip, and her brows furrowed. She glanced up again and flipped to the ice sculpture. "Why did you put that back on the desk?"

"What do you mean? You accidentally knocked it off."

"I did that on purpose. I didn't want Mr. Syd to see it, but you just _had_ to miraculously catch it."

"Well, sorry for being so coordinated. Besides, I couldn't bear to see a masterpiece like that destroyed when I had the power to do something about it."

Her face was rendered pink once again, "It's not that impressive."

"No other human could physically _do_ this, of course it's impressive. Hell, it's more than that."

Her voice was almost a whisper. "Thank you."

The silence began to drag, and she looked up again, "If we were to..."

"End up like..."

"Yes. It could easily look that way."

I nodded, "we'll need to be more careful then."

"Or just careful. You're suggesting that we actually..."

"True. A misunderstanding would be..."

"Disastrous, for all involved."

"Exactly."

Elsa's eyes wandered back to the icy sculpture with a weary sigh, and after examining it, she carefully repositioned its placement on the desk. "We need to sweep for cameras," she stated plainly.

"That would be wise," I admitted as she stood, and then followed her out.

— —

We only went through the areas that Elsa frequented, as, like she had said, the idea of surveillance was reasonable enough to a certain degree, and Syd had merely overstepped that particular boundary by about several thousand kilometers. We started at the ground floor and worked our way up, visiting the bathrooms, the parlors, and the library, followed by the dining room, all of which contained quite a few cameras and microphones to Elsa's extreme annoyance and chagrin, and all of which she viciously shattered with ice.

We eventually arrived in front of her bedroom door, a wooden and beveled rectangle with a metal handle just like all the rest of them. It was painted white with little minimalist swirls and flowers. It was the main room from her childhood, a realm of mystery and secrets that I had never ventured into before. Elsa had decided not to move into the master bedroom chambers after her parents' passing, and instead continued to reside there in her old room.

She unlocked and pushed open the door, and bid for me to follow, likely sensing my apprehension. Her blue eyes looked up at mine, "you can come in, just don't touch anything. Or open anything."

"That would make it difficult to sweep for bugs."

"I'll do that, you just...handle the rest."

"Yes, ma'am."

She was about to correct me when she remembered that we might not have been as alone as we once thought we were, and instead just turned away, platinum-blonde hair trailing behind her as she entered the room. I followed, and found it to be somewhat chilly inside, which wasn't really surprising, considering. It was also clean and sparsely furnished, but she spent much more time in her study than she did in here, so that was to be expected as well. The dressers, vanity, and even the nightstands had quite a few drawers, a few of which were locked, and the top one on the left bedside table had a padlock _and_ a keypad. So many secrets.

I drew my curious eyes away and cast them towards the ceiling and other crevices, searching for anything resembling what we had found in Elsa's study and the other rooms we had searched. With close observation, we usually found them quite easily; it's hard to make something inconspicuous while also placing it in a spot that acts as a good vantage point. Bugs were in some ways easier to hide, what with being smaller, but this time, I came upon nothing, as did Elsa as she rifled through the drawers and checked under and around the furniture. She sighed irritably and closed the last drawer with perhaps a bit more force than was necessary, grumbling, "Of all the places to put cameras, this should have been the most logical choice. Considering that he even had them in the bathrooms, privacy obviously means nothing to him on any level."

"Well, there is one place we haven't checked..." my eyes glanced over at the locked drawer.

Elsa's gaze followed, and her eyes widened, "Oh no, no, no, we're not looking through that one."

I shrugged, "You can check it on your own, I won't look."

She didn't say anything, but her face began to redden along with her uncomfortable expression. "Later. I don't want you in here when I..." Her suddenly shifty eyes glanced about the floor, and she changed the subject, "Is there anything else we haven't checked?"

"No, I've already reviewed all the viable positions."

She sighed, "we should move on then." She glanced at the locked drawer one last time, and stalked out of the room and its awkward atmosphere. So many secrets.

I had a sudden epiphany the moment I followed her out of the room. "Elsa,"

"What?"

"What if instead of searching the whole manor, we just looked for his control room?"

She stopped, physically startled by the clever and now seemingly obvious suggestion, "Wow, that makes a lot more sense."

She abruptly took a right turn down one of the halls, seemingly at random to me, and I frowned, "Do you even know where it is?"

"I've spent the majority of my life in these halls—granted it was under the cover of night, but I know of a good place for us to start."

We turned another corner and were suddenly by the elevator. A short ride up brought us to the fourth floor, with the landing pad and a CTV, which idled upon the helipad, on-call and waiting at all times in case it were to be needed at a moment's notice. Elsa continued forward and took a right down the hall closest to the exit doors, blonde braid whipping behind her as the last part of her that I saw before she disappeared down the corridor. I exhaled through my nostrils in annoyance at her disregard for safety, though I could hardly blame a person for feeling secure in their own home.

When I finally rounded the corner, I noticed immediately that it was a neglected part of the manor. The lack of windows cast it in a much dimmer light than the rest of the interior, and the walls and floor were noticeably less clean and maintained; parts of it even looked damp. I caught up with Elsa, whose pale clothes and hair stood out like lanterns in the dark hall.

"Watch your step," Elsa ordered without turning, hips swaying as she picked her way across the carpeted ground.

"Is there something wrong with the floor?" I asked.

She shrugged, and I frowned in puzzlement, before traversing the hall just as carefully, avoiding anything suspicious, just in case.

Before long, we came upon a door with a chip scanner and a keypad. Elsa placed her wrist up to the scanner, but was denied. She huffed, arm dropping loosely to her side, "Unbelievable. He reprogrammed the damn scanner."

"Well at least now we know this is probably the right room," I replied, looking around with folded arms. I examined the way from which we had come, hearing the crackling of ice from behind me, and attributing it to Elsa's frustration. "Perhaps we should wait for him to pass through-"

A heavy crash and the crumbling of something heavy—like stone—followed, and I whipped around to find Elsa standing before a rectangular hole that stood where the door had been. Crystalline blue remnants were left near the hinges while the rest of the door remained only as bright, translucent blue broken shards and pieces that were scattered on the ground inside the dark and smoky screen-lit room.

I sighed, off-guard, and with my heart still racing, "...Or we could just insta-freeze and break it. Yeah, really stealthy."

"I have no reason to care about stealth. I'm not the one in the wrong, and if we do happen across him with all the noise, the confrontation will make things much simpler."

A third pair of footsteps echoed from across the hall, along with an arrogant, sly voice that never failed to piss me off, "Simpler in what way?"

We both turned abruptly to find Mr. Syd approaching us, dressed not in his usual suit, but in an old white t-shirt worn under an equally used dark, olive-green hoodie that his hands were resting in. On his lower body, he wore faded socks and worn sweatpants. A lit cigarette stuck out the side of his smirking mouth, and a crumbly bit of ash dropped from the stick to further dirty the already dank and grimy carpeting. He took a drag from the roll and blew the cloud out at us, causing Elsa to squint against the thick smoke.

"I've had my suspicions for a while now, but haven't been able to confirm these abilities of yours until just now." His narrowed eyes widened for a moment, "It's really quite impressive, I must say, but it's also very, very..._curious_." He took another pull from the cigarette under hooded and sinister eyes of hazel that danced and glowed like an insidious bonfire, not unlike the tip of the papery rod of death that he held between his lips.

Elsa stiffened, "You knew we were coming." Her words were a statement—an acknowledgement of the truth, not a question.

His grin fell away to make room for a disappointed frown, accompanied by a condescending tilt of the head. "Of course. I'm not really sure how you expected to be able to sneak up on a man whose eyes can see literally the entire extent of this estate from the comfort of a chair and his pajamas. I've been monitoring the two of you for quite some time." The grin returned as he drew on the cigarette yet again. "You actually missed quite a few of my little presents."

"It's starting to look like this is about a hell of a lot more than just watching out for long-term threats," Elsa spat.

His smile widened; it would have appeared comical if not for his dark gaze. "In a way, you could still say that it is."

Elsa's jaw tightened, and the temperature of the room began to drop along with that of her demeanor. "It seems that your familial loyalties are intact after all," she growled.

Syd stopped short, and at first I thought it was because Elsa had hit the truth on the mark, but Syd sudden burst out laughing, letting out a terrible, cynical, and ominous cackle that sent a hand to his forehead and another to his hip, holding the cigarette, along with tremors of unease that went through all who heard his howling. His real mask was finally off.

"You humans always look at everything as either one or two colors. it's always either black and white with you all, one or the other. I'm not on anyone's side but_ my own_, Elsa. While your orders and South Isles' motives may be one thing, my personal interests are another altogether."

Her arms began to ice over, "and what would _those_ interests be?"

"None of your concern." The smile was gone, replaced with the same masked expression that Elsa was wearing. The events that followed once again cast the veil aside, and capsized my recently settled understanding of the world, beginning the series of events that completely changed it all for the worse.

Ice came up from the floor as frozen knives, and it was only quick thinking on my part that prevented Elsa and me from being skewered on them as I tackled us both out of the way. After we landed hard and rolled onto a dry patch of the floor, I turned to her with wide and bewildered eyes, "What the hell are you doing?"

She was breathing hard and beginning to panic. Her voice was a frantic whisper, "that wasn't me! That wasn't me!"

I looked up, and saw Syd sneering, with his forearms covered in frost that shaped his fingers into dragon-like claws, cold mist emanating from the deadly, curved blades. I was stunned, "there _are_ more of you..."

Syd spat out his cigarette onto the icy floor, and shrugged offhandedly, "it's not quite what you're thinking, but I don't feel like explaining. I'd rather not waste my breath!" His face twisted inhumanely, and a spire came out from his hands and found its way deep into my shoulder, splashing blood over my skin and the ground, and soaking into the fabric of my clothes as the force of the impact propelled me backward to slam into the wall with a grunt, and leaving me to hang from the embedded icy spear. I strained to squint through the pain and the darkness that surrounded my fading vision as gravity pressed me down onto the freely bleeding wound.

Elsa screamed in animalistic fury and heart-wrenching anguish, and I could feel the hairs on my arms stand up as the sweat on my skin froze solid in the now subzero air. The pain began to numb with the cold, and I saw Elsa as she ceaselessly threw and commanded wave after wave of ice at Syd with indefatigable fervor, while he would in turn block, deflect, and evade everything single one of her attacks while skating around on the icy floor and the slick, frozen ramps that he would conjure. I couldn't tell if either of them were injured, my vision was beginning to swim, and the shapes slowly became more and more vague. An explosion rocked the world around me and jarred my fading consciousness from slipping into the void. Light shined suddenly and blinded me for a moment, pushing me even further from the edge within my mind. I saw Elsa climbing back up from a massive hole in the wall through which the fiery, orange light of the evening sun now streamed in, glinting otherworldly against the blue, frozen hues around the space. I saw Syd approaching her at his leisure, playing with snowflakes and icicles that he summoned as he gloated over his powers.

The wind was incredibly loud as it blew in, but I still managed to hear Elsa's voice carry like a spirit through the frosted air, "what the hell is _wrong with you?_" she screeched at Syd, and her eyes locked with mine for a split moment.

The damned, manipulative bastard chuckled, facing away from me, and I took the slinking chance by the scruff of its neck, reaching my unpierced, but still weak, arm up to the holster hidden within my suit jacket as I attempted to draw out the handgun from within it.

"You sound so cliché, Elsa," Syd continued, stepping closer to her.

It took me a few tries to yank the gore-covered firearm out of the holster; the cold had hardened the crimson fluid that had dribbled out of the wound and all over everything. It warmed at my touch and began to smear over my hand as I struggled to line up the sights of my gun with a single, shaking hand.

Syd took another step in his slow walk towards my charge, "Just because you're about to die, doesn't mean you have to be all dramatic about it." Her gaze left his again, and he started, whipping his head around, realizing all too late that he had made a mistake at the exact the instant that I fired.

The shot met its mark, splashing blood as he spun, lifting him off-balance, and sending him over the edge, out of the hole on the fourth story of the immense Arendelle Manor. I did not see him land on the grounds below, but I heard the sickening thump of his body and the crunch of his bones all too well.

My gun fell from my trembling arm as it refused to continue supporting the weight of the heavy, metal weapon, low as I was on the sanguine fluid that I depended on for life, and that was running down my body, dripping from my shoes and onto the messy ground below. I coughed, spilling even more blood, now from my lips, and the coppery taste reminded me of past memories that I had longed to forget. Elsa heard me and finally managed to scramble up onto the floor again, actually slipping on her- on Syd's ice as she came toward me. She was yelling something, but I was fading away again, and couldn't hear. I hoped that it was my name, and closed my eyes as I passed into the patient embrace of the darkness, with the cries of a blonde angel as the last thing I heard, and her lovely smile as the last thought to grace my brain.

— —

**A/N: **And that, my friends, is a cliffhanger. See you in two weeks. (I will do my best to avoid boats, so you needn't worry about me being lost at sea.)

Happy holidays!


	8. Changes

**Chapter VIII: Changes**

"Wait, you _died?!_" Anna was so distraught and confused that she honestly looked betrayed.

Kristoff shrugged rather helplessly, "I'm honestly not sure what happened. The next thing I remember, I was encased in ice, there was snow everywhere, and everything else was gone, lost in this wasteland."

"So _you_ have amnesia too." She laughed bitterly, "Well isn't that just _perfect._"

He frowned sharply, "What do you mean _too_?"

Anna looked down at her lap, "I can remember her face, and her smile, her favorite color, the things she liked, and the things she hated, but...that's about all. Everything else is just a blank, along with most of whatever else happened before this eternal winter."

Kristoff's expression darkened in a strange form of sympathy, and he stood up before leaving the room.

"Hey! Where are you go-" He came back with a hefty stack of leather-bound books, and placed them on the wooden coffee table. "Oh."

There were at least twelve of them, and they were all somewhat worn, with the worst condition ones being on the bottom, and the newest-looking volume sitting on top.

"These are the rest of the journals," he began, and started checking a few of the titles. "Some of them go before my time in Elsa's service, but the rest should lead up to what I can remember," he picked up a reddish-brown volume that was situated in the middle of the stack, "and hopefully farther." Kristoff held the bundle of memories in his hands in a moment of hesitation, before passing it to Anna, who took it gingerly. She glanced between Kristoff and the journal as if expecting him to at any moment change his mind, snatch it back out of her hands, and clutch it to his chest like a greedy leprechaun with his gold. He instead placed his hands in his pockets. "you can read them, just don't run off with them. I...don't want to lose these."

Anna nodded solemnly in understanding; these volumes were the only thing Kristoff had left of Elsa, whom she had begun to realize that he cared for very deeply.

"Did...did you love her?" She asked in a sudden burst of courage. She looked up into his eyes, and saw only pain and the sorrow that it brought, swimming in and darkening his brown eyes. He didn't say anything. He didn't need to. Anna dipped her head solemnly, and slowly took the book into her lap.

A board creaked somewhere outside, and everyone froze. Anna's gaze flitted around the room, and she glanced back at Kristoff as he got up and crept silently toward the door. "Were you expecting someone?" she asked.

"Stop talking."

"Wha-" Marshall clamped a hand over her mouth, startling her and Kristoff, who had both forgotten that the silent giant was even there. Marshall nodded at Kristoff as he continued to hold a now squirming Anna, and Kristoff returned it, before continuing to creep toward the door, picking up his rifle when he got up to it. He leaned up against the wooden door and waited, hoping again that the visitor would simply go away. They knocked again, and still Kristoff waited. He heard an irritated sigh from the other side of the door, and a familiar voice boomed, "Oi! Your lights are on! Stop trying to hide, ya?"

Kristoff groaned with closed eyes before exhaling sharply, and checked to make sure that his rifle was loaded. Marshall did the same with his handgun while Anna frowned as she sat, confused, unsettled, and now tightly clutching the journal to her warm chest, her heart pounding against the leather cover as her eyes flicked around rapidly.

The knock came again, and Kristoff dared to steal a peek out through a break in the boarded-up windows. About half a dozen men, armed with worn winter gear and old weapons varying from shovels and hatchets to hunting rifles and makeshift crossbows, were coming up the snowy lawn, with a giant of a man already standing by the door, dressed in a snow-dusted black coat over a muted blue turtle neck and with a small yellow-green hat atop his bearded, wind-flushed head. In one massive hand, he held a magnificently deadly 12-gauge shotgun.

"Fuck."

"What?" Anna looked after Kristoff again as he ran about the room, grabbing a large duffel bag from a corner of the room along with a hiking backpack and proceeding to add a few extra items from around the cabin. He dropped the bag by the low table next to Anna, and began scooping the journals into the gaping hole, before outstretching an anxious and impatient hand at the young woman as she watched in paralyzed confusion. "Give me the book!" he commanded insistently. Anna began to hand it to him and he snatched it roughly from her before throwing it in with the rest of the volumes and zipping the luggage up. He turned to the pair who watched him, "We're going out the back," he stated clearly, and then to Marshall specifically, "keep on your guard." The other bodyguard nodded, and started to follow Kristoff, with Anna tailing, towards the back of the cabin and around a corner. Kristoff managed to undo the latch just as the sound of splintering wood from the front of the cabin filled their ears. "Go! Hurry!"

They burst out into the biting cold as it whipped at them like tentacles and screamed at them like banshees, running through the drifts of snow and into the illusion of safety provided by the swaying trees. They still kept running underneath the canopy of pine needles, and could hear the shouts from the armed men behind them, along with loud, heavily accented calls of "find the bastard!" and "I want his head on pike!" among other vulgar and belligerent exclamations that were lost on the howling wind. The steepness of the slope began to increase as they half-ran, half-slid down it, and Anna tripped, causing her to roll down the rest of the way before tumbling out onto flat ground when they finally reached the base of the hill. Marshall helped her up to her feet as he passed, and Kristoff egged them both on, looking over his shoulder at the two of them as he ran, and then back up the hill where they had come from. Anna looked back too, and noticed a familiar black car parked on the road and half-buried in the snow. Beside the dead vehicle, four empty sleds with their dogs still attached now sat parked haphazardly in the clearing.

"Do you have a place where we can find shelter?" Kristoff asked as they continued to run. The gale was picking up even more, and bringing little flakes of sleet that whistled by—the harbingers of a merciless blizzard.

"We've all been camping out in a cave somewhere near the base of the mountain!" Anna yelled through the wind. Her eyes widened, "oh shit, we left Olaf there!"

"He's probably still inside, Anna," Marshall reminded her.

"But we've been gone for hours! What if he went after us?"

Kristoff perked up from the front, "Then we'd run into him on the way down, assuming he didn't kill himself trying to scale a cliff. There's only one safe route up or down this mountain."

They figured they now had enough of a lead now to stop running, and thus slowed their frenzied pace down to a brisk walk. The silence stretched on as they trekked for over an hour, creating a growing void that eventually not even the screams of the wind could fill. Anna couldn't take it anymore; something had to be said, even if it was just idle conversation. "That man out there wasn't...Oaken, was he? I think you mentioned him during your retelling, but he seemed more...I don't know, docile?"

"He was...once."

"What happened to him?"

Kristoff shrugged, "It's been five years, and the end of the world. A lot of things happened to him," he turned to the wind flushed Anna and looked into wide and curious teal eyes with lashes flaked with snow, "along with everyone else. We've all changed."

Anna looked back again at the path behind them, the subtly downward sloped incline with their sets of footprints gradually disappearing in the storm and the fog, and mulled over Kristoff's words for the rest of the journey down.

— —

Olaf was still reading when they came back, and he perked up when a flash of strawberry blonde passed into the flame-lit cavern. "Anna! You're back!"

Anna looked up at the sound, and smiled back at him, somewhat apologetically, but he didn't seem to notice or even care too deeply that they had left him behind.

"Why were you gone so long?" he asked casually, and his countenance suddenly shifted from relieved joy to a frozen expression of surprise as a bearded and gruff-looking Kristoff stepped in behind Marshall. Olaf gasped, "you found Sven!"

Anna whipped around, twin braids trailing,abruptly confused for a moment, but quickly understanding the mistake. She pointed at Kristoff while looking at Olaf, "Oh, no, no no, this is Kristoff, actually."

He gasped even more dramatically, "So you actually found him out there? Oh, that's wonderful!" He did a little dance where he sat.

Kristoff smirked at him, "Oddly, you don't seem to have changed a bit after all this time."

"Nope!" Olaf replied, and then shrugged before looking away, visibly burdened by an unseen darkness for a moment before his wide smile returned. He turned to Anna, "I've finished the journal, and I have _so much_ to tell you!"

Anna pointed at the mountain man, who was glancing about the cavern, "Actually, Kristoff told us quite a bit too—that's actually kind of why we took so long," she added apologetically. Her hands clasped behind her and she leaned forward expectantly, "So where did the journal end?"

"July 14th in the afternoon, right after the scene at the coffee shop!" He beamed at Kristoff and the memory, before looking back to the book as he flipped through it, gesturing as he spoke with his free hand, "I've been going back over all of it and tried to analyze it for anything useful but-" he glanced up and stopped upon seeing everyone's worried expressions. "What? Does something happen afterwards?"

"Yeah," Anna exhaled, rubbing her forehead, "quite a lot, actually."

They began to quickly debrief and reiterate what Kristoff had told them before, finding their way to places around the fire as they spoke, and ending the whole recount with a presentation of the rest of the volumes, which landed on the stone ground with a heavy thud, and caused Olaf's eyes to widen.

"So..." he looked around at the others, "we all have amnesia?"

"What? No. No, you don't, and neither does Marshall, I think." She turned to him, "do you?"

The big man shrugged, and Olaf squinted slightly with his guilt, "I think he and I might actually have a few gaps," He pursed his lips and nodded confirming the thought in his head, "but it's nothing major," he added quickly, "not at all like what you two are missing."

He clapped his hands together and changed the subject, "Well, I suppose we should get started!" As Olaf grabbed and opened the next journal that they were to read, Kristoff stood up and stalked over toward the exit of their shelter, and Olaf whirled around to face him, "and just where are you going, mountain boy?"

"Don't call me that," he snapped. "I'm not leaving, I just don't like hearing people read my words," he admitted somewhat bashfully from under his mask, something which Anna was now beginning to witness firsthand. He sat down by the cave's entrance and stared out into the swirling maelstrom of whites, grays, faded blues, and orange reflections. Olaf shrugged, turned his attention to the new volume, and with a deep breath, began.

— —

I awoke to the sight of an off-white, tiled ceiling, and was so out of sorts that I couldn't bring myself to do anything but stare at it, studying the patterns of its markings and counting the tiles. I heard the beeping of the heart monitor to my right, and the shallow sounds of my breathing as the rest of my senses gradually began to return to me. Smell and taste were next, linked, and bringing forth a dry, rough, sandpapery feeling within my mouth, along with the fragrance of pine and the pleasant scent of the flowers I rarely found in the mountains, both of which graced my nose as I inhaled. Touch was the last thing, the feel of the uncomfortable bedsheets, the chafing of the rough and paper-thin hospital gown, the pull of gauze and bandages, an odd pressure of what I could only assume was an IV, along with the cold yet comforting feel of another's hands, clasped gently yet securely within my own, and the tickling sensation of long hair dancing languidly along my arm.

With considerable strain and effort, I managed to raise my head, and I saw her. Her head rested at my side, face down, and her pale hand gripped mine with another delicate palm atop it. Her head of unkempt and loosely braided platinum-blonde hair shone brightly underneath the fluorescent lights as it lay on the edge of the bed in a delicately beautiful heap. Her back rose and fell slowly, softly, as she breathed. I smiled despite myself, forgetting for a moment all sense of place and duty, of responsibility and reputation, but in a flash, all of those things returned to me, and my gaze hardened as my eyes swept the room like a hunter—or perhaps its prey—scanning around for the auburn shadow that was always there, watching with its arrogant, self-important gaze, but now, it was gone, and there was a long moment that passed before I remembered why.

The tempo of the heart monitor had increased from my anxiety, and the change caused Elsa to stir, letting out a soft moan as she sat up, blinking and rubbed at her eyes, failing to notice the worse case of bedhead that I had ever seen, and that had somehow managed remain hidden from my view before she had awoken. She blinked a few times to dislodge the remnants of her drowsiness, and looked down at my hand with a depressed sigh. She squeezed it tenderly, and turned to look at my face, inhaling sharply and freezing up just like her ice when she saw that my head was upright, and that my eyes were locked onto hers. I couldn't tell if she was going to scream or cry or be angry with me, but she did none of those things. She was speechless, and perfectly still except for the trembling of her hands, which were still clutching mine.

"Are you alright?" I asked.

"Why the hell are you asking _me_ that?" she retorted with a wavering voice, though I could still hear the hint of sass underneath it.

I tried to shrug, but a pain as sharp as a thousand needles laced its way through my shoulder, and a wounded grunt escaped from my throat. Elsa's mouth formed a small "O", and her arms hovered helplessly over me as I cringed and rode out the wave of agony. "Good point," I conceded hoarsely, and settled back into the bed with a heavy sigh. I managed to chuckle through the still pulsing ache and burn.

Elsa couldn't help but smile, and let out a small laugh as her hands returned to mine.

"How long?" I asked.

"Only three days. They finished patching you up yesterday, and I- we've been waiting for you to wake up ever since."

I nodded once in understanding before my eyes were ultimately drawn up to the crazed, blonde mane that was sticking up all over the place. It drew an amused smile out of me, and she frowned.

"What?"

"Your hair."

Her eyes were suddenly like saucers, and her lips thinned into a line as heat flushed into her pale, lightly freckled cheeks. It seemed she understood immediately what I meant. I laughed as she tried to tame the mess with her hands, her skin slowly resembling a tomato more and more with each passing second. "Shut up," she mumbled through her embarrassment.

I was suddenly distracted by the light snowfall she had unwittingly summoned above us. The flakes fell lazily and collected atop us, but stopped upon her notice. She brushed the remaining flakes off of my face with her soft hand, lingering for a barely perceptible moment on my cheek, with a bashful apology written across her face, and something unreadable buried deep within her gaze, "sorry."

"It's fine," I said lightly, but my expression then sobered as a series of memories began to return to me, "what's the news on Syd?"

Elsa also became more serious, and hung her head in defeat, staring down at our connected hands as she soothed them with a thumb, "they haven't found his body yet, though I'm not quite sure how; I don't think he could have survived that fall." She looked back at me, "you and I both heard him land. That sound," her eyes became distant as they returned to that day, "...he couldn't have just..."

"He wasn't exactly normal though, was he?"

She shook her head, and sighed cynically, "for the first time ever, I met another person who was like me, and he turned out to be a manipulative and arrogant bastard that was for some reason out for my blood." She huffed, "I wonder what that says about me." Her crystalline blue irises flipped again up to look deeply into mine, "thank you though, for saving me."

I smiled, "I was just doing my job."

A silent pause ensued. Her head bowed, and her hands retracted slowly, settling into her lap as I watched, dejected and now emotionally hurt in addition to the wounds that made me bedridden. Her bangs, straightened yet still an unkempt mess, hid her face, and she murmured, "was that really all it was though?"

I frowned with furrowed brows in confusion, and couldn't find the words I wanted to say. In a sudden build of resolve, I decided instead to act. My fingers reached out and laced with hers, and she looked up again with eyes full of hope and wonder to see my genuine smile, which effectively communicated everything that words could not.

— —

I was dismissed from Arendelle Central Hospital on the morning of the next day—the third Sunday of the month—and carried off from the medical complex of course by the black CTV that was stationed on one of the building's helipads. I sat crammed in the backseat between Elsa and Anna, who were silent and creating a heavy air of tension, looking anywhere but at each other. I felt as if I were nothing more than an immobile buffer set between them, wrapped securely as I was in a brace for my shoulder, with gauze underneath for bruised ribs, and a variety of bandages all over my person tending to various nicks and bruises, all of which basically inhibited any movement whatsoever other than walking. Anna's bodyguard, a large man whose name I did not know, piloted the vehicle off of the roof, and set a course for the manor.

Hidden from everyone else's view, Elsa was still grasping my hand; she had let go when we came into the sight of others, but when no one was looking, I felt the cool and smooth sensation of her pale fingers returning to mine. I thought back to Syd's warning, the first one he had given when he told us about the cameras. Even if his words were part of some grand scheme of his, he was still right; a tryst would ultimately destroy her career, and with this most recent incident—which they were actually attributing to an electrical fire in the surveillance room combined with yet another gas leak—we were still inching closer to that potential fate anyway, in more ways than one.

We arrived without incident on the roof, and headed inside. I noticed Anna was still following us as we all entered the elevator. Elsa pressed the button for the second floor and glanced furtively at her sister when the redhead did not select a different floor. Anna was instead trying to smile at everything; the effort she was making was making it clear that something wasn't right; something was severely bothering her. Being ever the optimist, she was likely reminding herself that this was the most contact that she's ever had with her sister in a very long time.

Her bright beam of a smile swiveled around to shine on me, so clearly forced that it was almost cringe-worthy. "Feeling better?" she asked, anxiety pushing an oddly high rise in pitch into her otherwise genuine tone.

"Somewhat, I suppose," I replied honestly, "though with my current condition, it may be necessary for Elsa to continue being supervised by her temporary bodyguard." Anna frowned and cringed, clearly knowing something that I did not. I glanced suspiciously at Elsa, and saw her stiffen uncomfortably, leading me to frown as well. This did not bode well.

The elevator doors opened, and we all piled out, splitting off from Anna and her guard as she continued on past us down the high ceilinged hall with a bowed head, cast into the darkness of a silhouette as she and her companion approached the intersecting corridor where the morning rays shone in through the tall, glass windows. Elsa stopped at her bedroom door, and watched Anna as she disappeared around the corner.

"Is everything alright?" I asked from behind, startling Elsa, and causing her to spin around and look at me for a moment, before diverting her gaze.

"Everything's fine," she clipped, before settling into a tight-lipped grimace.

I cocked my head slightly, "Are you sure? You seem distracted."

She shook her head, "It's nothing."

I sighed, knowing by now that "nothing" was definitely _not _nothing.

"Elsa,"

She turned away with a groan, "Please don't say it like that, you sound like my father."

"Just tell me what's wrong."

She shook her head, and her hands clutched at her arms,"You're not going to be happy with me..."

'I'm kind of getting to that point already." My face was impassive, and I waited with folded arms.

She sighed futilely, still not meeting my gaze, and seemed to visibly sink."I didn't request a temporary bodyguard."

I groaned, frustrated again by her continued disregard for safety. "Elsa, requesting one is _basic procedure_, surely you're aware that-"

"I don't _care_ about basic procedure, or _protocol_, or...or any of that!" she snapped. Her eyes looked up at me incredulously, "Have you not realized that by now?"

My hands rose as I began to gesticulate, "These methods were created to ensure your safety—and this particular bit is just common sense; _I can't protect you from a hospital bed!_"

"I can take care of myself!" she yelled. There was frost was everywhere now; I hadn't noticed it before. She caught my gaze and followed, before looking down again with a tightened jaw and wet eyes, ashamed of her lapse in control.

"Elsa, being able to defend yourself from an aggressor or an assassin with your powers is one thing, but fighting off the media and the public after exposing your abilities is another thing altogether! I know you remember Syd's words better than I do, as you weren't the one bleeding to death while suspended by a spear, and even _I_ heard what he said. You're powerful, and he believed you to be dangerous, dangerous enough that he felt threatened and wanted to kill you. Who knows how many others like you are out there, or how many of them are trying to hunt you down? A thug in an alley wouldn't stand a chance against you, even if he had a gun, but we both know now that you don't stand a chance against those icemen by yourself. If I weren't there when he attacked you..." I trailed off, eyes dropping to my hands, where were held out before me, feeling completely and utterly conflicted as my desires fought against decorum.

I heard a sniffle, and when I looked back at her, I saw that she was in tears. Elsa wasn't a crybaby; I've seen men twice her size yell into her face at the top of their lungs when they came into her office, or shouted across the boardroom at her, and she would stare into their blazing, rancorous eyes with her own cold intensity as they raged, responding when the tirade was done with a voice as calm as water but as stern, solid, and unforgiving as ice. She would hardly bat an eye, never showing weakness, but now, she stood before me, leaning into me, clutching me as if I were a raft and an anchor as tears ran uninhibited down her face.

"I'm sorry..." she wept. Her voice was even less steady than it had been when I had first woken up after the incident, and she repeated those two words over and over again until I began to brush a hand across the top of her head, and she finally began to calm. Even after she had quieted, I still held her, and began to wonder if she was asleep.

She sniffled again, "I didn't think to find one because I never left the hospital," she admitted into my chest through the fabric, the flesh, and her tears.

I stepped back to look at her from an arm's length, my good hand resting on her right shoulder, "why would you..."

"I couldn't bring myself to leave," her hands clutched at her own chest as she stared at them with distant eyes.

I frowned, sympathetic but worried, "That...probably looked suspicious. Remember, we don't want anyone to think that we have anything...going on." The memories of our contact and tender moments in the past few days, including this one, returned to me, and I tensed with fear.

Elsa laughed slightly. "I don't think I really even care anymore," she said quietly, gaze still somewhere else. A small smile still graced her lips, "They can believe whatever they want, it doesn't matter to me what they think. Besides," she looked up, eyes still wet but not glistening with any new tears, "it's not entirely strange for a charge to feel close to their bodyguard."

Her eyes continued to look into mine, and a spark of something was moving back and forth between us; something was building. It began to snow again, and at that point I knew that she felt it too. I suddenly felt like I knew what to do, but at the same time, I also felt hesitation, rising and struggling against the pull and the urge. Was this really something I wanted to do? Was this a path that I was prepared and willing to go down? I wasn't sure. Even as I write this, I'm still not sure if I...want her like that.

She felt my apprehension, and the moment dissolved in an instant along with the snowfall. She instead tucked her blonde head back into my chest and embraced me, her small, thin arms wrapping around me as tightly as they could, and i returned it as best as I could with one arm. We would leave it like this, for now, until we could sort out what exactly it was that we were feeling toward each other, and what we would do about it. The snow was cold against my back, but from her, I suddenly felt an unprecedented warmth that swallowed me whole, and I hoped that I would never have to let go.


End file.
